Microsoft: Another 3,000 job losses as Satya Nadella continues restructuring

Axe to fall mainly on back-office staff, including IT support

Microsoft is laying off a further 3,000 staff as new CEO Satya Nadella continues his reshaping of the company. The layoffs are part of the 18,000 job losses announced in July and are largely from back-office functions, including human resources, finance, sales and marketing, and IT support.

It follows cuts of 13,000 jobs in July when the restructuring was announced by Nadella, who said that a total of 18,000 positions would go. Then, of the 13,000 job losses, 12,500 were from handset maker Nokia, which Microsoft had only just acquired. The cuts were especially deep in Nokia as Microsoft decided to discontinue Nokia's low-margin, but hugely popular, feature phones.

Test engineers were also hard hit as Nadella - a former engineer himself - sought to change the way that the company tests software and other products across the company. Nadella's vision is that product testing should be rolled into the product developer teams, rather than handled by a separate specialist team.

Last month, Microsoft cut 2,100 jobs, largely in the Seattle area where the company is based. Staff have been offered severance packages to soften the blow.

Back then, in September, it was noted that further job cuts were in the pipeline, but with the majority of layoffs being completed by the end of this year.

"We've taken another step that will complete almost all the 18,000 reductions announced in July. The reductions happening today are spread across many different business units, and many different countries," confirmed Microsoft in a statement accompanying the latest round of layoffs.

Before the layoffs, Microsoft had more than 125,000 full-time staff, including 25,000 employees it acquired when the Nokia deal was completed. As a result of the layoffs, Microsoft will incur pre-tax charges of between $1.1bn and $1.6bn in severance and other costs over the next four quarters.

The last major round of layoffs at Microsoft occurred five years ago, when former CEO Steve Ballmer made redundant some 5,800 positions, attributing the cuts to the economic downturn following the global financial crisis.