NOKIA MOVES , REMOVES 40,000 JOBS

Nokia is shifting the manufacturing of its smartphones to Asia. cut 4,000 factory jobs in Finland, Hungary and Mexico.  The company has nine manufacturing plants in all.

The move, designed to speed up production in the fast-moving smartphone market, will mean the loss of more than half of the 7,100 jobs at the three factories affected.

The redundancies take the total number of planned job cuts at the group to more than 30,000 since Stephen Elop took over as chief executive in September 2010.

"Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market," said Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president for markets. "By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive."

The work of assembling phones will be handed to Nokia's existing workforces in Masam, South Korea, and the Chinese capital, Beijing. The remaining European and Mexican workers will focus on customising phone software according to language requirements or the specifications of individual mobile networks.