[blumentopf]

One piece of information that's missing in this article:

Nokia closed down its plant in Bochum, Germany in 2008 and transferred the jobs to Romania in Eastern Europe where labour is cheaper. This damaged their reputation in Germany significantly. The Bochum theatre put up dumpsters where people could get rid of their Nokia phones and replace them with a competitor product.

It's not a small irony that just 3 years later, the employees in Romania lose their jobs as well.

In retrospect, the people in Bochum got really lucky because Nokia agreed to pay millions to be able to shut down their plant.

Edit: The Bochum theatre also produced a play at the end of 2008 with the prophetic title "Connecting People - Erinnerungen an einen Handy-Hersteller" (memories of a cellphone manufacturer), its cast consisting of former Nokia employees: http://www.derwesten.de/wr/westfalen/kultur/Erinnerungen-an-...

[guard-of-terra]

I wonder how much it costs to build a new plant in another country and shut down and old one while transferring operations, and I would probably bet some money that they actually lost money on that.

3 years of operations probably did not offset costs.

[blumentopf]

They received subsidies from Romania and the EU for building the plant in Cluj that they'll likely have to return if they close down the fab early.

That's why they agreed to pay millions for closing down the plant in Bochum, because they had received subsidies for building that plant in the 1990s and the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen claimed they didn't fulfil the conditions under which the subsidies were granted.

Here's a PDF with some details (page 12): http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/emcc/erm/templates/displaydoc...

Quote: "Nokia received German state subsidies for its production in Bochum and will be exempted from the real estate tax in Romania, while the infrastructure for its new plant in Cluj was subsidised by Romanian and EU funds."

Nokia would really hold the world record in shortsighted management if HP hadn't ousted them in that discipline this summer.