Ericsson plans to close last of its manufacturing sites in Sweden; to cut 3,000 jobs

Mobile telecoms equipment maker Ericsson plans to close the last of its Swedish manufacturing sites, cutting around 3,000 jobs in the country, Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet reported on Wednesday. Manufacturing facilities in the cities of Boras and Kumla will be closed, the paper reported citing internal documents, ending 140 years of production in Sweden for the company which began as a producer of telegraph and telephony equipment. The affected jobs are in the network products division which is the company’s biggest business area, the paper said. Ericsson, which has about 120,000 employees worldwide - including 17,000 overall in Sweden - has seen demand stagnate in developed markets where the most advanced networks have mostly already been built. It said in July it would roughly double cuts in operating expenses to adapt to a weaker market, meaning annual savings of some 10 billion Swedish crowns ($1.17 billion)from the second half of 2017 compared to 2014. It did not say at the time how planned cost cuts would affect jobs. Ericsson was not immediately available for comment. This comes right after the company has teamed up with Qualcomm and other companies in the field to form Avanci. Avanci is a joint license patent consortium in the IoT (Internet of Things) field. With inputs from Reuters