Microsoft to cut 1850 jobs worldwide with streamlining of smartphone hardware business

One area he did mention was Microsoft's Continuum feature for Windows 10 Mobile, which allows a smartphone to connect to a monitor and essentially act as a PC.

But Microsoft's phone business has struggled to eat into the market share of the major players Google and Apple, and Microsoft has since moved away from the Nokia brand, selling off its featurephone business earlier this month.

In summer 2015, Microsoft wrote down $7.6 billion related to its mobile-phone business and cut 7,800 jobs from those operations.

The new sackings will mostly affect Nokia's home turf: 1,350 of the redundancies will be made at Microsoft Mobile Oy, headquartered in Finland.

The hammer has fallen on Microsoft's smartphone division.

But CEO Satya Nadella says the company isn't completely abandoning the phone business. Ballmer had faced significant resistance internally for his plan to acquire Nokia, and Nadella was initially against the move into smartphones.

It's no secret that Microsoft's mobile business has been adrift for years; buying Nokia Devices and Services business in 2014 didn't help matters.

Microsoft confirmed today that Microsoft's mobile division in Finland will be hit with 1,350 job losses, while another 500 jobs will be cut from various other offices globally. Microsoft has been promising developers a single Windows platform, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), that spans phones, tablets, PCs, Xboxes, HoloLenses, and anything and everything else that someone might want to run software on.

According to a company media release, this will result in the organisation registering an impairment and restructuring charge of around $950 million, of which around $200 million will be linked to severance payments. More information about the head count cuts and smartphone business changes will be unveiled in Microsoft's fourth-quarter earnings announcement on July 19, the company said.

If you've been a Windows Phone user or Microsoft watcher for the past couple of years, you've seen a decrease in the sales of Windows Phone 8.1 and the new Windows 10 Mobile phones.

Source: Microsoft to cut 1850 jobs worldwide with streamlining of smartphone hardware business