Ericsson to cut 1,500 more jobs than expected in wake of nightmarish Q4 '09 earnings call
Just when you thought that infrastructure firms would be banking ridiculous quantities as carriers around the world kick off LTE trials and full-scale network upgrades, it looks like we're actually still stuck in a bearish period on Ericsson's news that its profit fell a whopping 92 percent to $43.4 million from the same period a year prior. Analysts probably thought the same, too, seeing how they'd reached a consensus estimate of 2.5 billion kronor (about $346 million) in profit, generally making this a quarter Ericsson would like to forget as quickly as possible. That'll be difficult, though, because it's currently on the path to cut several thousand jobs, which is where the other shocking half of this news comes into play: they've now bumped the total cuts from 5,000 to about 6,500, perhaps a side effect of the fact that new CEO Hans Vestberg sees the dead-in-the-water market "staying the same" so far against the fourth quarter. So c'mon, carriers of the world -- let's drop a few hundred billion into 4G upgrades right this second, shall we?
