Nokia, Sprint announce layoffs

Here’s a bit of chill in the broad­band economy.

Mon­day, rumors swirled that Sprint would lay off sev­eral thou­sand work­ers this year, after lay­ing off 5000 employ­ees last year. The Nex­tel net­work inte­gra­tion has taken more time and money than antic­i­pated, while the company’s WiMax ven­ture stagnates.

Mobile tel­cos live and die on cor­po­rate sales. Nex­tel cus­tomers have been loyal to a fault, but that annoy­ing push-to-talk fea­ture is old news. Com­pa­nies want lower prices, more fea­tures, and supe­rior coverage.

Tues­day, Nokia announced it will lay­off 2300 work­ers at a Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­ing plant. Pro­duc­tion will be moved to lower-cost coun­tries like Roma­nia. Nokia has laid off 9000 more work­ers in its joint ven­ture with Siemens.

Infor­ma­tion­Week men­tions both com­pa­nies in this arti­cle.

In this Reuters arti­cle that appeared on Fri­day, Ger­man politi­cians have vowed to pun­ish Nokia for the plant closure.

Another Reuters arti­cle on Fri­day con­firmed that Sprint is lay­ing off 4,000 work­ers. The com­pany has also con­firmed that over 900,000 sub­scribers have left Sprint in the last year. Sprint stock took a 25 per­cent dive on the news.

Tagged as: broadband, economy, EU, Europe, Germany, GSM, Internet, mobile, network, Nextel, Nokia, Romania, Sprint, telecom, USA, WiMax