Nokia Ramps Up Pink Slip Production

Nokia (NOK) is following up the voluntary redundancies it announced last month with a few involuntary ones. Its hand forced by the continued deterioration of the mobile phone market, the company said this morning that it will sack 1,700 employees. “Nokia plans to scale sales, marketing and technology management to match the pruned portfolio and global consumer demand,” the firm said in a statement.

A grim announcement. But an inevitable one. As I’ve noted here before, Nokia shipped 113 million handsets world-wide in the fourth quarter of 2008, down 15 percent annually. And in January, the company warned that world-wide sales in ’09 are likely to fall 10 percent year-to-year. As CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo put it at the time, “the macro environment is challenging and, we believe, will remain so in 2009.”