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Microsoft is planning to lay off 2,850 people in addition to the 1,850 that the company announced would be cut in May.
Microsoft made a 10-K filing on July 28th where it stated that additional job cuts will be made during its 2017 fiscal year.
Part of that filing stated:
"In addition to the elimination of 1,850 positions that were announced in May 2016, approximately 2,850 roles globally will be reduced during the year as an extension of the earlier plan, and these actions are expected to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2017."
As of June 30, Microsoft employed about 114,000 people full-time.
It is unknown at this time how many – if any – cuts will be made to UK-based staff.
This is not the first time that the company has announced large-scale job cuts. In 2015 Microsoft announced it would be cutting 7,400 jobs; in 2014 the company planned to axe 18,000 staff after the acquisition of Nokia.
The news comes after the July 7th announcement that COO Kevin Turner was to leave Microsoft to become CEO of Citadel Securities, a division of Citadel LLC. His responsibilities were divided among a handful of existing Microsoft execs as part of a sales and marketing reorganization.
Before Turner’s departure Microsoft’s Chairman of the Board signaled in a Bloomberg interview that Microsoft planned to make some changes to its sales organization in order to speed up the company’s transition to the cloud.
As was evident from Apple’s results call on Wednesday, the future for big tech companies is increasingly looking like it’s headed into services and cloud computing as opposed to hardware. While this array of job cuts might seem drastic, Microsoft sees it as a necessary part of their business to keep up with Apple.
