Microsoft has announced it will be laying off an additional 2,850 employees. That’s on top of the 1,850 layoffs it announced in May. Most of the affected employees are ex-Nokia employees, who came to the Windows giant as part of its ill-fated acquisition of Nokia.
The layoffs were mentioned in the Redmond firm’s annual SEC filing. The company says it has already notified 900 of the affected employees, and the rest of the Nokia gang will get the ax by mid-2017.
As Recode points out, this means the company has essentially shed nearly all of the Nokia mobile phone business that it acquired back in April 2014 for its $7.2 billion payment.
Microsoft had hoped its $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia would make it a major player in the world of smartphone hardware. However, Windows Phone sales have amounted to next to nothing, and sales are in free-fall.
The Nokia deal was one of the last remnants of former Microsoft head honcho Steve Ballmer, with the purchase closing shortly after current CEO Satya Nadella began his reign. Nadella has basically been working to shed the company of the Nokia burden, and instead has lead a charge to include more of Microsoft’s technology on iOS and Android devices via MS apps, such as the recently released Microsoft Pix app, which claims to automatically take better photos than Apple’s own stock Camera app.
