Bangalore: Nokia Siemens Networks, the telecom equipment maker, may lay off almost 2,000 employees or about 20 percent of its direct workforce in India as a part of global restructuring exercise aimed at cutting losses, reports Gulveen Aulakh and Kalyan Parbat from the Economic Times.

The company, which is the joint venture between Finland’s Nokia Corporation and Siemens AG of Germany, had said that it intends to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide. Nokia Siemens has been struggling against rival network companies from the past few years.

Nokia has been internally classified as “old tech” several verticals in its Indian Arm. These include its fixed-line voice over internet protocol, wireline broadband access, WiMAX, carrier Ethernet, business support systems, microwave transport and the communications and entertainment solutions business.

One the spokesperson of the company told that they cannot provide a breakdown of headcount reduction by geography, but they are very clear that mobile broadband and services will drive their forward strategy. Most changes by way of workforce cuts in the company will be areas that don’t fit well with these business lines.

However, according to the company spokespersons, the company has no immediate plans to lay off 5,000 indirect staffers in India, but they did not rule out the possibility of some cuts in future.

One of the top executive of the company told that, appropriate measures will be taken after considering the individual circumstances and opportunities in each business.  

According to industry reports, in the year 2010-11 the revenue of the company’s Indian unit fell 5 percent to 6,177 crore, form that of Rs 6,500 crore in the previous fiscal. However India remains as a key to Nokia Siemens as its services division that contributes nearly 50 percent of its global revenues which is headquartered her in India.

The company has not planned to cut jobs at its 3,000 strong research and development center which is located in Bangalore, or its Chennai manufacturing unit which employs over 1,000 executives. Job cuts are also unlikely at the 300-member R&D centre in Hyderabad, which had come under its fold when it acquired Motorola’s worldwide wireless network assets for $1.2 billion in the year 2010.

Some of the industry executives who are familiar with Nokia Siemens told that, the people who are hired to the company by the third parties are likely to get hit first and that the company may also stop hiring in India.

Another industry executive claimed that the company may merge its circle wise support systems by enabling it to reduce headcount across multiple layers of engineering, operations and maintenance, third party network up gradation and support verticals which were created to support the 24 telecom zones that are situated in India.