Mobile phone maker Nokia has significantly restructured its IT organisation as part of an ongoing cost cutting strategy.
The company announced today that it will axe around 300 IT jobs and outsource around 850 to Indian IT providers TCS and HCL Technologies.
Nokia already engages TCS for software development and HCL Technologies for IT support services. The split of outsourced roles will be ‘up to’ 560 for TCS and ‘up to 260’ to HCL.
The majority of the affected roles will be those currently located in Nokia’s native Finland but its global IT operations – which include roles in the UK – will also be affected.
A spokesperson told Information Age that the company will retain a "significant" internal IT operation but declined to reveal how many IT jobs will stay in house.
There will now be an eight-week consultation period after which the cuts and job transfers will commence.
Nokia said that these are the last of the 10,000 job cuts it announced in June last year, as part of a strategic cost reduction drive.
As part of the same announcement, Nokia said that it would focus its smartphone strategy on its Windows Phone-based Lumia devices.
Earlier this week, Nokia announced preliminary results for the final quarter of 2012. It said that the Lumia unit had delivered "better than expected results", with net sales of around €1.2 billion.
This is the first positive news after a long period of decline revenues and profits at Nokia. The Finnish company stands alongside RIM and possibly Microsoft in the club of companies who were gravely affected by the launch of the iPhone.
