Microsoft is expected to announce another major round of job cuts as it aims to cut down its costs within its struggling hardware division, in addition to the 18,000 it had previously reported would have to be made.
The announcement is expected sometime later today (8 July), with the majority of jobs cut expected to be from its smartphone end of the business, which has struggled to ignite popular interest, despite its acquisition of Nokia last year for US$7.2bn.
According to The New York Times, sources within the company confirmed the impending announcement, but a spokesperson for Microsoft, Frank X. Shaw, refused to comment on the speculation.
Siliconrepublic.com reported back in July of last year that the company’s CEO Satya Nadella wrote an email to staff explaining why it needed to cut 18,000 staff from its international workforce to ‘realign’ its staff.
Microsoft has also been selling off parts of its business of late, most notably its stake in Nokia’s HERE mapping software, which was sold to car-sharing app Uber, which agreed to take 100 of Microsoft’s employees as part of the purchase.
Likewise, Microsoft has transferred 1,200 staff to AOL as part of an agreement that will see it exit the online advertising market with the sales of display, mobile and video ads going to AOL.
These decisions would certainly appear to follow Nadella’s comments in June that ‘tough choices’ would have to be made by the company to return it to closer to the dominance it once had within the tech market.
Microsoft store image via Shutterstock
