The hits keep coming for Nokia’s employees. The Finnish vendor today, following years of massive job cuts, warned that it will cut up to 10,000 more jobs in 2021 and 2022. 

The job cuts follow the loss of more than 6,000 employees in 2020, and almost 5,000 employees in 2019. By the end of next year, Nokia’s workforce will have effectively been cut by at least 20% since 2019, as it plans to reduce its workforce to a base of 80,000 to 85,000 employees worldwide during the next 18 to 24 months. The company said it employs about 90,000 people today.

Nokia did not say which business units will be most impacted by the latest wave of job cuts, but it expects to save at least $713 million in costs under the plan by the end of 2023. The company said it expects to realize roughly half of those savings this year, 15% in 2022, and the remaining 35% in 2023. 

Nokia deftly provided notice about its job slashing plan between yesterday’s news about a trio of deals it struck with the world’s largest hyperscalers and an event for analysts and investors later this week when it’s expected to share more details about its three-year turnaround plan. 

CEO Pekka Lundmark has made significant changes to Nokia’s operating model just seven months after taking the helm of the beleaguered company. The company has been remade under four business groups, the executive team is shrinking from 17 to 11 people, and at least 14,000 employees are being moved from corporate functions to Nokia’s for core business groups. 

Lundmark also forcefully dismissed the company’s legacy “end-to-end” strategy as part of the restructuring, noting that the integrated selling model added unnecessary complexity. Even straightforward radio access network (RAN) deals involved five senior executives, he said.

The reorganization, which formally got underway at the beginning of the year, also places heightened pressure on each business unit to achieve market leadership. Segments where Nokia can’t achieve leadership as a top-three vendor won’t be tolerated for long, Lundmark warned at the end of 2020.

The company today said it aims to make its Mobile Networks unit “the indisputable top in wireless mobility networks and associated services” by increasing research and development (R&D) investments and accelerating digitization efforts. The RAN portfolio will also be streamlined with reduced investment in mature or declining parts of the business, according to the company.

Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services division is “shifting away from owning products to consuming outcomes, delivered as-a-service from the cloud,” the company said. The vendor’s expansive deals with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are central to that effort across 5G RAN and mobile edge computing.

Network Infrastructure, which includes Nokia’s IP, optical, fixed, and submarine networks, will be largely unchanged other than increased R&D spending, according to the company. The same goes for Nokia Technologies, which includes the vendor’s patent, technology, and brand licensing businesses.

Nokia is still struggling due to critical mistakes it made in technology choices, specifically on silicon. It also lost a major contract with Verizon last year when the operator effectively kicked Nokia to the curb and awarded roughly half of its RAN contract to Samsung with a $6.64 billion deal that runs through 2025. 

Ryan Koontz, senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, who originally told SDxCentral about the shocking move in July, later described it as one of the most significant vendor losses in a decade. That loss occurred one month before Lundmark returned to Nokia as CEO.

While Lundmark has framed the turnaround plan as a three-year effort, he’s also made it clear that he’s willing to make significant changes to Nokia’s business in the interim. It remains to be seen if the company is heading for a split, or otherwise spun-off into separate standalone businesses, but Lundmark and his leadership team will share more details about the company’s vision during an investor conference on Thursday.