Nordic telecommunications group Telia Sonera said on January 12 it had given notice to 1,200 Swedish employees, a move the company said was in line with a cost-cutting package announced in February 2008, and would mainly impact its broadband services. A year ago, the group said it planned to cut 2,900 jobs of which two-thirds were to impact Sweden.

The measure was estimated to cost some three billion Swedish crowns (287.4 million Euro) of which slightly more than half was to be carried in 2008. In all, the programme was aimed at creating savings of some five billion crowns, the group said. Northern Europe`s largest telecommunications concern was formed through the December 2002 merger of Sweden`s Telia and Finland`s Sonera, and employs some 27,000 people. TeliaSonera provides telecommunication services in the Nordic and Baltic countries, in Spain and the emerging markets of Eurasia, including Russia and Turkey. In 2007, TeliaSonera`s net sales amounted to 96 billion crowns (8.6 billion Euro) and at the end of December 2007 the total number of subscriptions exceeded 114 million in 18 countries.

"We have reached our saving objectives but we cannot guarantee that no further layoffs will come," the Telia Head of Communications told the daily newspaper DN, a move that ired the workers unions. ?We could never have dreamt that the there would be so many redundancies and we can`t see any relevance in this figure,¯ said Berith Westman, President of UNI`s Swedish affiliate Unionen at Telia Sonera.