As a part of its plan to reduce 18,000 employees or 14 per cent of the company's total staff, the Redmond giant Microsoft has most recently notified approximately 3,000 employees that they are losing their jobs. The layoff involved 638 positions in the company's Redmond headquarters in Washington and the rest are spread across numerous business units in other countries.
A Microsoft spokesman said in a statement, “We have taken another step that will complete almost all the 18,000 [manpower] reductions announced in July. The reductions happening today are spread across many different business units and many different countries."
It is worth noticing here that Microsoft has first announced the layoff of approximately 18,000 employees in July, which includes about 12,500 job cuts related to Nokia's handset division acquisition. The next announcement has been made in September which left approximately 2,100 unemployed.
According to some reliable sources, a final wave of cuts is expected in early 2015.
Upon completion of the job reductions, Microsoft's workforce will be around 110,000 employees.
Microsoft officials said that the layoffs will make the company incur pre-tax charges of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion for compensation and related benefits costs and asset-related charges over the next four quarters.
