Mobile phone giant Nokia Corporation has announced that it will axe 1,700 jobs worldwide. Nokia China will find it very difficult to avoid this round of job cuts.

On March 18, Nokia China confirmed the planned job cut. According to Nokia's head office plans, the company will dismiss 1,700 employees across the world in the coming months.

This job cut will involve many departments. Besides its mobile phone department, it will also include marketing, enterprise development and global support departments. This is the second round of job cuts within half a year for the world's largest mobile phone producer.

In November last year, amid turbulent waves of job cuts by various IT giants, Nokia announced its plan to axe 600 jobs. The first round of job cuts, however, was limited to countries including Finland, the UK, the US and Singapore, while Nokia China merely made corresponding readjustments to its organizational structure.

However, compared with the 600 job losses of the first round, the scale of this "storm"will clearly be a lot fiercer.

Relevant staff at Nokia China have said that it is possible to make adjustments for a few positions. In fact, the company put forth a "voluntary resignation and incentive-based voluntary retirement package" last month, encouraging employees to resign voluntarily.

From March 1 to May 31, the first 1,000 employees who voluntarily resign from the company will be eligible to receive a severance package, so that employees may avoid the fate of having been dismissed by the company.

Nokia had hoped that the adoption of this more humane measure would be sufficient to reduce human resource costs and the various pressures caused by compulsory job cuts. But in reality, this measure seemed unlikely to succeed as hoped.

Moreover, Nokia is also encouraging its employees to take vacations without pay this year, such as one-month short-term vacations or annual leave.

By People's Daily Online