Nokia closed down its plant in Bochum, Germany in 2008 and transferred the jobs to Romania in Eastern Europe where labour is cheaper. This damaged their reputation in Germany significantly. The Bochum theatre put up dumpsters where people could get rid of their Nokia phones and replace them with a competitor product.
It's not a small irony that just 3 years later, the employees in Romania lose their jobs as well.
In retrospect, the people in Bochum got really lucky because Nokia agreed to pay millions to be able to shut down their plant.
Edit: The Bochum theatre also produced a play at the end of 2008 with the prophetic title "Connecting People - Erinnerungen an einen Handy-Hersteller" (memories of a cellphone manufacturer), its cast consisting of former Nokia employees: http://www.derwesten.de/wr/westfalen/kultur/Erinnerungen-an-...
3 years of operations probably did not offset costs.
That's why they agreed to pay millions for closing down the plant in Bochum, because they had received subsidies for building that plant in the 1990s and the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen claimed they didn't fulfil the conditions under which the subsidies were granted.
Here's a PDF with some details (page 12): http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/emcc/erm/templates/displaydoc...
Quote: "Nokia received German state subsidies for its production in Bochum and will be exempted from the real estate tax in Romania, while the infrastructure for its new plant in Cluj was subsidised by Romanian and EU funds."
Nokia would really hold the world record in shortsighted management if HP hadn't ousted them in that discipline this summer.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-...
I can't imagine why I would ever spend a penny on anything made by Nokia or Siemens, again.
another point-of-view, would you also blame cisco aiding and suppressing dissident movement in china just because their equipment was/is the one being used to do so ? on the same lines, i think, the hand wielding the knife should be taken to task, rather than it's manufacturer...
Did you even read the article? This Nokia-Siemens joint venture built was not specifically targeted at wireless.
You make it sound as if Iran and Egypt just bought a certain model of wireless routers or switches that Nokia-Siemens happened to offer on the international market.
No, the Nokia-Siemens joint venture was specifically created as a bid for the custom monitoring technology Iran needed. They probably re-used some of that knowledge when Egypt needed a similar system, later.
This is not just a question of Iran ordering some pieces of hardware equipment that the way they installed it just happened to help them find more "dissidents" to torture.
Nokia-Siemens designed, developed and built the infrastructure, it entails a littlebit more. They knew from the start exactly what this system they were building in Iran was going to be used for, they designed it and sent over their expertise to lay the f#ing cables and configure the routers and switches so that it did what Iran ordered it to do.
No, I wouldn't blame some corporation for selling hardware/equipment that happens to be used for tracking down people to torture.
Yes, I do blame a corporation when they bid to a specific order that really doesn't leave any doubt as to what the system is going to be directly used for, proceed to design it (again with the "requirements" crystal clear), develop, build and deploy it on the spot.
Bye bye Western technology. It was nice knowing you. "Greater scale and proximity benefits" are crowning China as the new 800lb gorilla. Special thanks go to the "let's outsource to China for $10M bonus this year" top management.
What a trainwreck."
I find news about Nokia interesting, so thank you for posting this, but what is up with the tone of the article? It feels more like a youtube-comment than news.
Is hardware > software or is software > hardware or is software ≈ hardware?
They've lost the plot when they started to ignore the limitations of Symbian, probably because they had invested so much on it very early in the game and so it had gained almost 100% mindshare among their engineers. Then the iPhone came out and the leadership lacked courage to tell engineers that Linux was the future and they should all retrain RIGHT FUCKING NOW; instead there was a lot of internal politicking, keeping Maemo at bay and trying to put lipstick on the Symbian-UI pig.
Some of those layoffs are deserved, in a way, since resistance to change was coming from below as much as from above. Shame that it took an idiotic leader making the worst possible choices to make people see the error of their ways.
They should've kept supporting Symbian, but focus on Maemo (or a new OS) from day one (after the iPhone launched). Supporting WP7 over Android will probably be the final biggest mistake that Nokia did.
I'm sure they can survive even by just following the current strategy to the bitter end (i.e. becoming Microsoft's bitc-- er, preferred partner). What they cannot do is to grow or even just to stay relevant.
Whats troubling is that it is reducing manufacturing... Does it actually expect to sell less phones and if it does than how does it plan to make money... They are mass market devices, numbers are really important
They will also stop manufacturing phones in Finland. The plant in Finland won't be shutdown (yet) but they won't be manufacturing phones anymore.
stephen elop's only hope is for nokia's vertu sales to remain high.
