Nokia could cut 10,000 to 15,000 jobs globally, Reuters reported a Finnish union representative as saying, as part of its global redundancy programme announced last month.

In April the firm announced thousands of job cuts in Finland and Germany, citing its acquisition of Alcatel Lucent, which closed earlier this year, as well as challenging market conditions and a technology shift.

Last month’s announcement was reported to have included 1,300 job cuts in Finland and 1,400 in Germany. However, the Finnish loss has been trimmed to 1,032, following negotiations, reports Reuters.

“We haven’t heard any official numbers, but based on the information from our union contacts, I would estimate the global impact of this round would likely be around 10,000 to 15,000 jobs,” said Risto Lehtilahti, a trade union shop steward at Nokia’s Oulu site.

He added that he feared the firm would have another round of cuts at a later stage.

Meanwhile another shop steward, Tuula Aaltola, said “some work will be completely terminated, some cuts come from Alcatel overlaps, and some work will be transferred to countries with lower costs.”

Nokia employs around 104,000 people worldwide and is holding talks with employee representatives in around 30 countries, the Reuters report said.

Mobile World Live contacted Nokia for comment and received this reply from a spokesperson: “Nokia has not given out any global figure. This is a global process with many moving parts in many countries, so we don’t have an overall figure to share.”

The underlying cause of the job losses, Nokia said in April, related to the Alcatel-Lucent deal, with reductions coming mainly in those areas where there are overlaps, such as R&D, regional and sales organisations as well as corporate functions.

In addition, it said it is adapting to a tough marketplace and a shift in resources to 5G, the cloud and the Internet of Things.

In October it announced a target of €900 million in operating cost synergies to be achieved in full year 2018, although no mention of redundancies was made at the time.

Earlier this month the company’s Q1 results featured a decline in revenue, which CEO Rajeev Suri described as “disappointing”, driven largely by its Mobile Networks unit, “where the challenging environment is not a surprise”.

At the same time Suri revealed Nokia has nudged up its cost-cutting target for the merger, seeking savings of “above” €900 million in full year 2018, compared with “approximately” €900 million before.