After selling off a big chunk of the Nokia brand to HMD global, Microsoft is now ready to lay its consumer smartphone division to rest as the company will be writing off USD 950 million today and will be laying off 1,850 employees.
In a blogpost, Microsoft has announced their intentions to “streamline” its smartphone hardware business, which will be affecting up to 1,850 jobs. To that end, the company is allocating USD 200 million for severence payment.
Microsoft’s Mobile division in Finland will be receiving the brunt of the layoffs as an estimated 1,350 jobs will be cut, with the remaining 500 layoffs expected to occur globally. This move effectively means that Microsoft has thrown in the towel with the Lumia Windows phones, with the Lumia 650 being the last phone from the now-defunct division. While it is highly likely there will be no more Lumia phones, an e-mail by Microsoft’s Windows and devices chief, Terry Myerson, has stated that the company will continue to update and support current Lumia and OEM partner phones.
“We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation – with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same. We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms,” says Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
While Microsoft’s Nokia experiment is officially dead, the company’s smartphone ambitious may not be entirely over. Rumours are going around that Microsoft may be developing a Surface-branded phone, but seeing as the estimated release target is in 2017, we probably won’t be hearing about it for quite some time.
Source: The Verge