back to article He's baaack: Microsoft's axeman Nadella to give Chinese staff the chop

More Microsoft staffers will lose their jobs next month when the software giant closes two smartphone factories in China, according to reports. Japanese business daily Nikkei was first to report that the software giant plans to shutter its manufacturing facilities in Beijing and Dongguan by the end of March. A Microsoft …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Mikel

    Made in Vietnam

    Maybe somebody ought to check the working conditions in that one. For humanitarian reasons.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Linebacker III

      Presumably president Obama, using drones?

    2. JaitcH
      Happy

      Re: Made in Vietnam

      I live in VietNam and employ a handful, 35 to be precise, too.

      It might surprise readers to know that the Labour Code of VietNam is more stringent in regulation and more generous to employees than the labour statutes in the USA as well as other countries.

      The rules limit work to 48 hours/6 days per week - the seventh is a mandatory no work day. There are also mandatory leave periods for births, marriages and deaths. Health coverage has to be provided - there is a national health plan, and a national pension plan.

      There are factory inspectors to ensure work areas are physically and chemically safe for workers. Workers can have unions, and they can strike - even have 'information meetings' outside the gates of the plants.

      The advantage of Vietnamese workers over Chinese is that the Vietnamese language uses Roman characters, albeit modified by diacritical symbols, whereas the Chinese use characters.

      Assuming that VietNam has the same working conditions as China simply reflects the commenters ignorance. We have a minimum wage that is adjusted annually - one year the MANDATED PAY INCREASE WAS THIRTEEN PER CENT. Try that in the USA where many jurisdictions don't review minimum pay for years and years. Furthermore, there are different minimum pay levels for city and rural folk.

      As a Canadian my company complies with the Vietnamese Labour Law but we also voluntarily add Canadian work law to our governance. We use the 13-month Chinese calendar (four weeks per month) with the pay for the 13th month being paid before our people go on the annual Tet celebrations. We provide free infant/junior child care and we also have as-you-work massage therapy to ease the stresses of being seated all day.

  3. x 7

    Ironic

    closing mobile phone production plants in the country with the world's largest market. If you can't sell product there, then you haven't a chance. Or else management is too stupid to realise the local potential. All they had to do is hand the plants to Huawei or ZTE to run.....

    1. Puzzeled European
      Facepalm

      Never underestimate Microsoft management

      read the title

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Vietnam

    I jnow for a fact they are not even up and running yet and still waiting on equipment. That's how much stock of unsold windows phone they have lying around.

    This is all about windows phone further falling marketshare.

    1. JaitcH

      Re: Vietnam

      The NOKIA Ha Noi plant was OPERATIONAL IN 2013!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Why the hell did Microsoft buy Nokia? I just can't fathom their mobile strategy at all. The odd thing is that Windows Phone is now pretty decent, yet Microsoft senior management is conspiring to continually grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

    1. Ossi

      Nokia had started to make Android products, and wanted to sell its phone division. Microsoft really didn't have any choice.

      The biggest problem with Microsoft's phone strategy is that they were far too late to market. That's a constant with Microsoft. When Microsoft do finally enter a market they get obsessed with a 'strategy' (to the exclusion of, you know, what the customer actually wants). The irony is that they're clearly a company with no forward-looking strategy or sense of direction at all.

      1. Richard Plinston

        > The biggest problem with Microsoft's phone strategy is that they were far too late to market.

        Microsoft's first phone OS was in 2002. In 2007 they had 42% of the US smartphone market.

        'Being late' was not the problem.

        1. jgarbo

          Could being blind be the problem? MS seem not so much to see reality, as to force reality into their fantasy. Hardly ever works.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      windows phone pretty decent?

      Come on, get real. It might work as a basic phone, but try and do anything else with it, and its still the bug ridden mess its always been. Its. Bluetooth stack it a buggy mess that can't stream audio for any reasonable amount of time without stutter, it still reboots several times a week, gets laggy as hell on occasion, and the tiles are a truly horrible ui concept that stink of trying anything to be different.

      I don't know that may people that were stupid enough to end up with one (they walked into a phone shop and asked the salesman to sell them whatever paid him the best commission), however all but one of them have sold them and bought proper phones (moto g typically)

  6. Robert E A Harvey

    If I were a Microsoft shareholder

    ... I would be asking just what I got for my 5 billion dollars

  7. Mr Wrong

    Even if Ballmer had an idea why he's buying Nokia factories, Nadella definitely doesn't seem to share this idea. He will shut them all down and sooner or later he will quit making phones at all. I would do it sooner if I were him, Ballmer's step into hardware making was plain stupid.

    And for Nokia now it looks like it was extremely good deal: they got rid of idiot CEO and his management board, and got rid of factories that made huge costs to maintain. Next year, if they would decide that they wish to get some income from their still well known consumer brand and make some android phones, they will do them the same way as majority of competitors - using Foxconn. Pure profit for them, all loses on MS site

    1. jgarbo

      Was accepting the incompetent idiot CEO to scuttle the Nokia Titanic part of a devlisih plan to reincarnate Nokia from the inevitable wreckage wrought by Gates-less MS and aimless new management? Anyway, that seems to be the case. Anon.

  8. Queasy Rider

    I guess I had better buy that Lumia phone I've been eying before it's too late. I don't want to get stuck with Windows 10 desktop without a phone to match.

  9. JaitcH
    Unhappy

    " ... handset production will shift to its facility in Hanoi, Vietnam"

    When will smart publications learn to spell the capital city of VietNam correctly?

    It is HA NOI - the United Nations also uses the correct spelling.

    Maybe some readers live in Desmoines or Newyork or Berwickontweed?

    VietNam (my version) is actually Viet Nam, when spelt correctly.

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