Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will be laying off a total of 18,000 workers over the next year. While job cuts were expected at the company, the total number of cuts are much higher than was anticipated.
AppleInsider reports that the bulk of the jobs -12,500 – will come from professional and factory positions related to the purchase of Nokia. Microsoft’s $7.2 billion buyout of Nokia’s hardware division added some 30,000 employees to the company’s payroll.
The remaining 5,500 job cuts will come from other departments. The 18,000 number represents the largest amount of personnel cuts in the history of Microsoft, vastly outnumbering the previous record of 5,800 job cuts in 2009.
Microsoft employed just over 127,000 employees as of early June, an 18,000 person reduction in those numbers would represent more than 14% of the company’s workforce.
The first rumblings of job layoffs came earlier this week, as word leaked that the Windows maker would announce a major round of layoffs, although there was no indication of just how large the number of layoffs would be.
The layoffs are just the latest in a string of attempts to right the faltering firm, who has lost much of its business to mobile devices. While Microsoft was once a major player in the smartphone market, devices from Apple, and devices running Google’s Android OS have taken over the market, while sales of low-end PCs have been hurt by the iPad.
Microsoft said their restructuring plan will be “substantially complete” by the end of 2014, and fully completed by June 2015.
