Heise: On April 1, NSN (a joint venture of Nokia and Siemens) went into operation. But this news probably did not please the 60,000 employees of the new joint venture called Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), especially the 37,000 who used to work for Siemens. They used to be part of the now dissolved Com Division and have already suffered from the effects of the scandal surrounding the bribery payments made by Siemens’ former communication division. The scandals were one reason why the founding of this joint venture was postponed from the beginning of the year and Siemens was forced to invest 300 million additional euro in the new firm.Furthermore, employees are facing layoffs because NSN aims to cut costs by 1.5 billion euros, in part by making 9000 people redundant. Pessimists among the staff of the new company based in Helsinki expect far more jobs to be cut, particularly in administration, sales, and marketing.
To make things worse, there also seem to be management problems. For instance, employee council representatives are complaining that it is still unclear which joint products will be offered and which product lines will be continued, according to a report in today’s issue of German daily Frankfurter Rundschau. They charge that customers are “being left in the dark and are therefore ordering from the competition for the time being”. If so, NSN will have a hard time becoming number one in the telephone network sector. On the other hand, the network giant is already the third largest in this sector behind Alcatel/Lucent and Ericsson/Marconi.
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