Microsoft continues to cut jobs from its mobile phone business, and the latest news is that 1,850 employees will get the boot.
The layoffs follow last week's move, when 4,500 jobs were chopped after Microsoft sold its feature-phone business.
This week's job cuts will hit Finland the hardest, where a big part of Microsoft's Lumia manufacturing process takes place. At least 1,350 of the employees who got the boot are from the country.
Part of today's news is that the company will pay $950 million in impairment and restructuring charges, with $200 million going to severance payments. Microsoft said that the majority of layoffs will happen until the 2016 calendar year ends, while the rest are scheduled for the first half of 2017.
However, the OEM plans to stay strong in the mobile sector, albeit in a specific niche.
Terry Myerson, Windows and Devices chief, detailed the company's plans for the future in an email.
He notes that Microsoft will be "more focused" on the enterprise sector, a market that taps into the security and manageability that Windows 10 Mobile (and Continuum) can offer.
Myerson states that Microsoft wants to be pragmatic, which means that its "productivity services, device management services, and development tools" will reach other platforms than Windows. The company already delivers its Office word processing and spreadsheet package for Apple users.
The fact that the execs from the company want to give a taste of Windows 10 Mobile to business customers is a sound plan. More and more ventures find it useful to equip their employees with handsets that increase productivity, and Continuum has all the proper tools to do just that. It only remains that developers come up with more ways to integrate Microsoft's apps into Android and iOS.
"We will continue to update and support our current Lumia and OEM partner phones," Myerson's email reads. He goes on to add that scaling back is far from being equal to throwing the towel.
At odds with today's news, rumors claim that the OEM is working on an upcoming Surface Phone that will land during the summer of 2017.
In the first quarter of 2016, Microsoft reported a 0.7 percent market share, a dramatic drop from last year's non-spectacular 2.5 percent.
We will keep you posted on the developments of Microsoft and its dwindling phone business.
