KIANEWS 
HMD Global today unveiled its latest smartphone, the HMD Fusion, an affordable device whose idea is to change functions and style with a shell. This is how the HMD Fusion will initially be distributed, but additional devices will be available later this year.
Ericsson and Nokia cut 20,000 jobs
03. 05. 2025 Saturday / By: Robert Denes / Business / Exact time: BST / Print this page
F alling or stagnant sales, coupled with concerns about rising costs, have taken a toll on telecoms workers and their suppliers, gutting the sector’s workforce outside of China. The carnage among telecoms companies has been documented regularly in this publication. Between 2015 and 2023, the combined headcount of the 20 Tier 1 operators tracked by Light Reading fell by 438,000, a 24% drop from their 2015 total.
The recent exodus of telecoms providers from major Western suppliers is perhaps even more frightening. For many MWC Barcelona regulars, the first stop will be Ericsson’s multi-million dollar Tardis of the Ericsson booth, with ample seating and enough coffee to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Others opt for the nearby and not-so-spacious Nokia booth. In 2022, when MWC waved 61,000 attendees through its turnstiles, the two Scandinavian kit makers, which account for about 44% of all radio access network (RAN) sales worldwide, employed more than 190,000 people. While the event has since attracted 48,000 visitors, Ericsson and Nokia have collectively shed more than 20,000 jobs.
That’s a decline of about a tenth in just a few years, and it hasn’t been offset by the growth of other Western vendors in the RAN market. Parallel Wireless, a small US developer, doesn’t seem to have recovered from the mass guillotining in mid-2022, when about half of the company’s jobs were reportedly cut. As for South Korea’s Samsung, it was reported in June last year that 700 of the 4,000 domestic employees at Samsung Networks, the world’s fifth-largest RAN vendor, were being transferred to other parts of the group. Networking revenue fell 25% last year to about 2.82 trillion South Korean won ($2 billion), although Samsung’s latest financial report this week showed that it rose 8% year-on-year to 800 billion KRW ($560 million) in the most recent quarter ended March — its first quarterly growth since late 2022. Meanwhile, Japan’s Fujitsu, also in the top seven, recently announced it would be exiting networking equipment.
The cuts have swept through Ericsson like a tornado, cutting 12% of all positions since the start of 2023, leaving the Swedish company with fewer than 93,000 employees at the end of March. For mobile operators that increasingly rely on Ericsson as their governments ban Chinese competitors, the erosion of such a critical supplier’s workforce could be worrisome.
Nokia’s mobile network business’s profit margins have been hurt by the loss of its US business. The Finnish company has focused its cost-cutting efforts on mobile as a result, leaving network infrastructure, its other major unit and its best sales growth opportunity this year, relatively unscathed. The goal is to cut annual costs by about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) by the end of 2026 compared to 2023, and Nokia expects to find 600 million euros ($681 million) of that in mobile. The headcount is not broken down by business unit, but the total number of employees has fallen from an average of 84,795 in 2023 to 75,600 by the end of last year.
Nokia is similarly trying to protect research and development, along with other critical functions. Unlike Ericsson, however, it is not spending much more on research and development than it did a few years ago. Last year, it spent 4.5 billion euros ($5.1 billion), just 300 million euros ($341 million) more than in 2017. During the same period, Ericsson's annual expenses increased by 15.6 billion Swedish crowns ($1.6 billion). Despite severe cuts outside of research and development, Nokia reported an operating loss in its mobile networks business in the first quarter.
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