Microsoft is reportedly planning to announce the biggest round of job cuts in the company's history due to overlapping roles resulting from the merger with Nokia.
Microsoft, the biggest software company, is likely to make its first organizational change after officially claiming ownership over Nokia devices and services business in April. The acquisition added roughly 30,000 employees to Microsoft's workforce with several overlapping roles in certain areas. To overcome the issue, Microsoft plans job cuts, which will be the biggest in the last five years, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The job cuts will be from the marketing and engineering unit of Nokia Oyj handset and will be announced as early as this week. The overlapping roles that serve the same function in other divisions of Microsoft will be trimmed down. Bloomberg also reported that the job cuts could be the biggest in the company's history, exceeding the 5,800 eliminations in 2009.
The announcement follows Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's first vision statement last week to transform the company.
"Over the course of July, the senior leadership team and I will share more on the engineering and organization changes we believe are needed," Nadella wrote in a memo distributed to company's employees, Friday. "Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture." The company also noted a shift in focus from devices and services to productivity, mobile and cloud, areas where Microsoft has attained proficiency.
The last round of job cuts at Microsoft was during the recession period where the company trimmed down its workforce roughly by 5 percent. More details on the next big move are likely to surface on July 22, when the company will report its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings.
