Nokia Cuts 4,000 Jobs in Europe

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Finnish handset maker Nokia(NOK) said on Wednesday it plans to slash 4,000 jobs in Europe as it shifts manufacturing to Asia.

The cuts, which come on top of an additional 10,000 layoffs the company made last year, will come at factories in Finland, Mexico and Hungary.

Nokia is hoping the layoffs will allow it to better compete with rivals Apple(AAPL) and Google(GOOG) in the smartphone race. The company has been slowly losing mobile market share in the last several quarters, as its slice of the smartphone pie declined to 26.6% during the fourth quarter of 2011 from 30.7% in the same period a year prior.

Nokia is also hoping that shifting its phones from the Symbian platform to Microsoft's(MSFT) Windows Phone will boost sales. Its highly anticipated Lumia handset, running on Windows Phone, was released late last year and the company said it has sold over 1 million devices.

Other handset makers beside Nokia are undergoing drastic change to stay relevant.

Research In Motion(RIMM) last month announced that co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis had stepped down as the Blackberry maker tries to reinvent itself.

The company's stock has declined nearly 75% in the last year as it deals with the impact of large enterprise customers like Halliburton(HAL) and J.P. Morgan(JPM) letting employees bring their own mobile devices to work, rather than forcing them to use the industry-standard BlackBerry.

--Written by Olivia Oran in New York.

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