Nokia Plans to Cut Around 600 Jobs by 2019-End

Finnish telecoms giant Nokia said Thursday it planned to cut around 600 jobs in France as it seeks to make cost-savings and refocus its loss-making businesses.

The group said it planned to reduce its headcount in France by 597, a little over 10 percent of its total workforce in the country. French trade unions (CFDT, CFE-CGC, CGT, CFTC unions) called the move "unacceptable," and asked for a meeting at the Economy Ministry.

The Ministry told Reuters it would convene in the coming weeks a committee made of union and company representatives to monitor the issue.

The job cuts would concern central and support functions within Alcatel-Lucent International and Nokia Solutions Networks France, which employ a combined 4,200 people in the country, a Nokia spokeswoman told Reuters in an e-mail.

R&D functions were excluded from the plan and Nokia will seek to limit as much a possible forced redundancies, she said.

Nokia, which no longer makes handsets having sold that business to Microsoft, bought French-American telecoms equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent in 2015 in a deal that was expected to lead to savings.

The cuts in France will be focused on administrative and support services and will not effect research and development as it refocuses on high-speed 5G telecom networks, cyber-security and Internet-linked appliances, the group said.

Nokia is aiming to make EUR 1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) in total cost savings by the end of 2018 following net losses of EUR 766 million last year.

Written with agency inputs