Microsoft will reportedly lay off more than 6,000 employees, the largest layoff in the company’s history since 2009, this Thursday in a bid to trim down and reshape the newly acquired mobile phone business.
According to the New York Times report, citing sources familiar with the matter, most of the job cuts will be from the Nokia handset unit, which the Redmond acquired for $7.2 billion in April. The acquisition soared up Microsoft’s headcount to over 127,000.
The job cuts are aimed at eliminating jobs in the Nokia unit that duplicate the positions at Microsoft, as well as unnecessary marketing and engineering jobs.
Microsoft had already hinted at workforce reduction when it said that it aims to cut down $600 million per year in costs within 18 months of closing the acquisition with the Finnish phone maker.
The job cut comes a week after the software giant’s new CEO Satya Nadella had sent a long memo to the employees explaining the layoff is necessary to shift the company from being a primarily software-focused one to a cloud-computing and mobile-friendly software company.
A report from Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish daily newspaper, citing anonymous sources, says that the software company would likely lay off around 1,000 employees in Finland alone. While half of the job cuts would come from Nokia’s research and development division in Oulu, the rest 500 layoffs would come from other Nokia locations in Finland.
Microsoft is expected to posts its quarterly earnings report on July 22.
