Nokia cuts staff at China factory

Nokia Corp confirmed to the Global Times Sunday that the company's global retrenchment plan covers its factory in Dongguan, South China's Guangdong Province.

The company has cut about 100 staff at the Dongguan factory as part of its global strategic retrenchment which began in June, said Gao Xiang, a spokesperson for Nokia China.

Gao did not say which divisions of the factory have been involved in the layoff, but noted that the Dongguan factory is an important part of Nokia Corp and will continue to focus on the development of feature phones which mainly refer to mobile devices with Symbian OS, a lower-end operating system compared to Apple's iOS, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.5.

Nokia Corp has confidence in China's two main factories, with the Dongguan-based factory developing feature phones and a Beijing-based one developing smartphones like Lumia 900, he said, refusing to make comments on whether there will be further job cuts in Nokia China.

According to Nokia's second quarter 2012 interim report published on July 19, the company headquarters introduced a range of measures including "reductions within certain research and development projects, consolidation of certain manufacturing operations and divestments" in June, aiming to reduce costs and make the company profitable again.

A cut of some 1.6 billion euros ($2 billion) in expenditures and a reduction of 10,000 positions are expected worldwide by the end of 2013, said the report.

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