Once the world’s largest phone maker, Nokia recently grabbed headlines again after announcing plans to reduce its workforce by as many as 14,000 employees. The Finnish company is expected to cut its workforce by about 20 percent. Nokia currently has around 74,000 employees worldwide, including just over 17,000 workers in India.
Update: Nokia issued a statement to India Today Tech. The company said, “Any regional headcount reductions are part of Nokia’s global cost-savings program, which the company announced in 2023. As stated in the past, the target for this program is to make cost savings between EUR 800m-1.2bn by reducing headcount globally between 9,000-14,000 by the end of 2026. Nokia has not announced any specific regional guidance in India on headcount reductions. India continues to be an important hub for Nokia.”
While the news raised concerns, it also left many people asking a simple question: what does Nokia actually do today and why does it have so many employees? After all, it is no longer making phones.
Well, that much is true. It is no longer making phones, although it has licensed some of its phone technology to the company called HMD. But Nokia has not been about phones for a long long time. Instead, the company does something else, and in that space it is still a giant.
Nokia became the largest phone maker in 1998, a position it held until the first quarter of 2012, when it lost the top spot to Samsung. After facing increasing losses in the smartphone market, the company eventually sold its mobile devices and services business to Microsoft in 2014.
The key part here is “mobile devices and services business.” Because other business units Nokia retained. Beyond mobile devices, the company was operating in telecom infrastructure business, mapping services, and advanced technology division. And these businesses the company kept running. It still runs them.
Today, Nokia provides critical network infrastructure that powers connectivity across fixed, mobile and transport networks. In simple terms, the company builds the technology and equipment that allow mobile phones and wireless devices to communicate, access the internet and make calls. It also develops systems that enable devices to connect, share data and communicate over networks.
This means Nokia works mostly behind the scenes, providing the backbone technology that helps networks operate and connect with one another.
A major supplier of 5G technology
Nokia is currently a major supplier of 5G technology for telecom providers. The company has signed more than 400 commercial deals and works with over 1,000 private wireless customers. It is also delivering AI solutions for large-scale customer networks, helping telecom companies manage increasingly complex systems.
A giant in telecom market
Nokia operates in more than 150 countries, and its networks support over 4.4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. The company also holds more than 26,000 patent families and has received 10 Nobel Prizes for breakthrough innovations.
Its work now spans areas such as connectivity solutions for AI, autonomous networks that can self-configure, self-operate, self-optimise, self-heal and self-secure with minimal human intervention and research and development for 6G technology.
Interestingly, for the company the revenue is generated not just by the actual telecom gear that it sells to businesses across the world but also through royalties. Given that Nokia was a pioneer in networking, it holds key patents on a number of technologies that are used in multitude of devices, including in phones. These patents earn Nokia passive income. In other words, whenever a phone is sold, Nokia earns a little bit of money on that even if it is no longer selling phones directly.
Why Nokia is restructuring
The recent layoffs are part of a broader strategy announced by Nokia in November 2025. As part of this plan, the company said it would reorganise its business into two main operating segments — Network Infrastructure and Mobile Infrastructure. The goal is to better align with customer needs and accelerate innovation as the AI supercycle increases demand for advanced connectivity.
