Nokia Cut 1700 Jobs Worldwide

Nokia has announced that it will cut around 1700 jobs worldwide from its marketing, sales and corporate divisions to cope up with the rising cost of doing business. This is the third time Nokia is cutting its workforce in the past five months.
The company said it will scale back sales, marketing and technology management to match declining global consumer demand. The acquisition of Symbian last year had also made some Nokia jobs redundant, the company said.
The cutbacks will affect Nokia's devices and markets units, its corporate development office and global support functions.
Nokia's sales fell 15% year-on-year last quarter as profit slumped 69%. It predicts a 10% decline in device sales, a further downgrade of its already downgraded forecast.
The handset leader has also been losing ground to Apple and RIM. Nokia's market share in the smartphone market fell 10 percentage points to 40.8% in Q4, even as RIM's share climbed nine points and Apple's share more than doubled, Gartner revealed last week.
In November, Nokia cut 600 jobs, and in February the company closed a Finnish R&D center, cutting a further 320 jobs. Nokia had around 128,500 employees at the end of 2008.
Nokia aims to cut costs by more than 700 million euros ($907 million) by the end of 2010.
Nokia shares on the Helsinki Stock Exchange declined 3.3% to 8.71 euros ($11.32) following the announcement.