Nokia to Shift 800 Employees of Bangalore Unit to Accenture

Co expects to complete the process of shifting employees by the year-end

GULVEEN AULAKH NEW DELHI

    Nokia India is about to shift 800 employees working on the Symbian platform at its R&D unit in Bangalore to managementconsulting firm Accenture, a senior executive said.
Last week, the Finnish handset maker inked an outsourcing deal with Accenture wherein, the world’s largest IT consulting firm will provide software development and support for Symbian till 2016. “Discussions with the employees will begin next week and carry on till October-end. Majority of the employees are expected to shift to Accenture; the process will be completed by the year-end. Some of them are working on Nokia projects, they will finish them and move to Accenture,” a company spokesperson told ET.
Symbian is Nokia's legacy software and one of the most widely used mobile phone operating systems, with an installed base of over 225 million phones.
Earlier this year, Nokia said it would switch to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software from Symbian, which will be phased out in about two years. At the same time, Nokia will continue to invest in Symbian by bringing software upgrades and launching more smartphones on the platform, said Nokia India marketing director Viral Oza.
On Wednesday, the market leader launched Symbian Anna, the upgraded version of Symbian, and two smartphones based on the new platform. Over the next 12 months, the company will introduce 10 new smartphones on the Symbian
platform.
By August, the company will ensure all existing Nokia smartphone users can download Symbian Anna for free and in July, the company will begin to ship the N8, E7, C7 and C6-01 phones embedded with the new software to India.
“We’re not going to stop support to Symbian overnight because the ambition is not just to cater to existing users, but also selling 150 million more Symbian devices globally. We will continue to invest in Symbian till 2016, improve the S 40 series and in parallel introduce the Windows Phone,” Mr Oza said. The company’s strategy has some criticism from analysts but Gartner’s principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said it may be a perfect fit for India and China, its key growth markets.
“Nokia is significantly losing marketshare globally and in India, but Symbian is still in great demand in India. Nokia has around 40% marketshare in smartphones segment in the country. It plans to sell 150 million handsets on Symbian globally, a large part of that can come from India and China because of its brand recall and prices at which it retails in these markets,” Mr Gupta said.
Nokia faces tough competition from Samsung, Apple and Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) across the world, while domestic and Chinese handset makers are eating up marketshare in India. The world’s largest phone maker by volume in April overhauled its phone business, announced to reduce its global workforce by 7,000 apart from outsourcing Symbian software to Accenture.