Microsoft announced Thursday that it will cut up to 18,000 jobs in the following year to restructure the management layer.
CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to all employees notifying them about the job cuts. He wrote, “The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce.” Within the 18,000 cuts, 12,500 will be professional and factory workers. He also said this change will help the company to “become more agile and move faster.”
Executive Vice President Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia, also sent an email to Microsoft employees on Thursday. He wrote more on what the company will be working on in the future, as well as how they will approach it. He also said the decisions were hard to make, but the company needed to do it.
“We operate in a competitive industry that moves rapidly, and change is necessary,” he wrote.
According to CBS News, Microsoft’s work force increased from 99,000 to 127,000 when it bought Nokia in September 2013, so the job cuts are predictable. Investors seem to support the company’s decision as Microsoft’s stock price went up almost 3 percent and recorded a 52-week high of $45.7 when the announcement was out.
This layoff is the biggest one in the company’s history, which surpassed the 5,800 job cuts in 2009.
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