Nokia Bell Labs was placed under the spotlight over job cuts at the R&D division.

Former Bell Labs CTO and President Marcus Weldon took to LinkedIn to lambast parent company Nokia for reportedly halving the workforce since his departure from the unit.

“The total Bell Labs research headcount is about half of what it was compared to more than 1,200 when I left the role in 2021,” Weldon wrote. “Yes, there have been movements of sub-orgs that may account for 250 or so of the reduction, but I think this is still a 50% reduction over five years and that is both shocking and unprecedented.”

Weldon also expressed displeasure over the removal of the president position at Bell Labs, when Guru Parulkar was given the title of head of Nokia Bell Labs Research when he replaced outgoing president Peter Vetter in June. The Bell Labs veteran claimed the move denigrated a title that had “been in place for over 100 years to recognize the importance of this role in the parent company and the wider world.”

In a rebuttal made to Fierce Network, Nokia said Bell Labs “remains a deeply important part of Nokia, with a long track record of turning world-class research into technologies that deliver commercial impact and move our industry forward.”

The Finnish giant declined to comment on cuts affecting particular business units as the vendor continues its global downsizing. Nokia revealed plans in 2023 to axe 14,000 jobs by 2026 in an effort to reduce costs and save up to $1.4 billion.

Nokia's headcount today stands around the 78,000-employee mark, with recent cuts seeing more than 120 jobs lost in Finland, and reportedly 1,600 jobs lost in China.

The end of a decade in Future X?

Nokia’s China reduction came as the firm took back control of its Chinese joint venture Nokia Shanghai Bell, not to be confused with Bell Labs, although the venture’s formation in 2017 was planned to partly forward Nokia Bell Labs' Future X Network concept.

That concept was formed by Weldon in 2016, and posited a 10-year plan for Bell Labs in pushing an intelligence-first cloud-integrated network (CIN) that supports the rise of automation via increased IoT and edge devices proliferation (Weldon specifically mentioned 3D printers in his original vision).

The Future X concept also hinged on data analysis techniques based on inference of needs and information to assist human intelligence, predicting today’s compute-heavy AI zeitgeist.

A preliminary search by this title did not surface much Nokia material relating to the concept beyond 2018, nor was it mentioned with Parulkar’s hire in June. According to a LinkedIn post, the ex-Intel VP – who presided over the chipmaker’s Edge Computing Group – was brought into Bell Labs “to create a unified focus on breakthrough science and technology for the AI era” with a specific mention of his experience in SDN, cloud-scale infrastructure, edge platforms, and AI-enabled systems.

Nokia Bell Labs is headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, but set to soon find a new home at a a 370,000-square-foot development being built in nearbyNew Brunswick, New Jersey, a move suggesting some confidence from Nokia in the unit.