Microsoft Lays Off 3,000 More

Microsoft on Wednesday notified 3,000 more workers that they’re being laid off.

This means that virtually all of the planned 18,000 job eliminations the company announced in July are now completed.

Wednesday’s layoffs cut across different groups and geographic areas, but most of them were in finance, human resources, marketing and other support functions. Some of the cuts were also in MSN.

“We’ve taken another step that will complete almost all the 18,000 reductions announced in July,” the company said in a statement. “The reductions happening today are spread across many different business units and many different countries.”

The cuts are part of the 18,000 jobs — representing 14 percent of the company’s worldwide workforce of 128,076 last July — that CEO Satya Nadella had said the company would eliminate over the course of the year.

A large number of the cuts are related to Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business, which brought in some 25,000 Nokia workers to Microsoft.

Most of the cuts — about 12,500 professional and factory jobs — were former Nokia positions, with some Microsoft positions also being eliminated because of job duplication related to the Nokia acquisition. The remaining 5,500 jobs cut across multiple functions, including marketing and engineering.

Microsoft had also said in July that it was committed to notifying by the end of the year the vast majority of those whose jobs are to be eliminated.

This article appeared in print in the October 30th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.