Recent reports suggest that Microsoft is all set to announce the second round of layoff later this week as part of its planned 18,000 job cuts announced in July.
The software giant said that the company would be re-structuring its worldwide workforce by cutting 18,000 jobs, with 12,500 of those cuts affecting employees of Nokia’s handset and services business that was acquired recently by Microsoft.
The layoffs would take place over the course of several waves in a span of 6 months and 1,351 of the first round of employees cut would be based in the Redmond area, the company officials said.
The first round of layoff took place in July when 13,000 employees were made to leave the company. Those included some of the former Nokia employees as well as employees from the Operating Systems Group and every other group across the company. Microsoft’s realignment aims to reduce its dependency on “contingent” (non full-time) employees by 20 percent.
Although it is still unclear as to how many people will be losing their jobs by the time the latest cuts happen, it is believed that the layoff could happen today, September 18 and that the cuts would affect just about every group or division at the software giant.
The last major round of layoffs at Microsoft happened in 2009, when almost 5,800 positions were eliminated over the course of two-plus rounds. Then-CEO Steve Ballmer claimed the 2009 cuts to be a “response to the global economic downturn.”
