Nokia Siemens Starts Laying Off 1,500 Employees

Nokia Siemens Networks announced today that it will begin it's planned layoff of 1,500 employees. The decision comes following its acquisition of Motorola's networking business for $1.2 billion. The employees to be axed will come primarily from the WiMax and GSM departments of the former Motorola unit.

The action became necessary after the Motorola network acquisition got stalled when Huawei filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the transaction for fear that NSN would obtain its trade secrets and intellectual property, which Motorola had access to. This, in turn, caused the unit's products and services to fall into lower demand.

Hence, not only will 1,500 of the 6,900 employees from the Motorola WiMAX and GSM units be let go, but another 1,200 will be transferred to its LTE and WCDMA units, which are currently seeing more success. The first batch of workers to go will be 150 of mostly research staff from Nokia Siemen's Swindon facilties.

[via ZDNet]