Euronews: Ericsson Cuts Swedish Workforce

Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) are the big guns discharging in today's fusillade of EMEA headlines.

Ericsson is looking to reduce operations in Sweden and as part of this 1,550 jobs are to go at various sites in 2013. Bearing the brunt of the cuts is the Stockholm plant, where 1,000 workers will face redundancy. Ericsson currently employs nearly 18,000 in Sweden. (See Ericsson Sheds 1,550 Staff in Sweden, Ericsson Cuts 1,550 Jobs and Ericsson Talks Up Market Growth.)

A strong performance in Latin America has seen Telefónica's overall net profits in the third quarter increase by 26.4 percent year-on-year to €3.4 billion (US$4.3 billion). Indeed, for the first time the revenue generated by the Spanish giant's Latin American operations exceeded that from Europe. (See Telefónica Cuts Net Debt to €52.8B , Smartphones Drive Telefónica Europe Growth, Euronews: Telefónica to Flatline, Says S&P and Telefónica: A New Breed of Telco.)

Analysts are again predicting that Alcatel-Lucent is about to drop out of France's CAC 40 index of blue-chip companies, reports Reuters, with some saying that next month could see the vendor's exit from the list, in which it has been a fixture since the CAC 40 was created 25 years ago. (See Euronews: S&P Downgrades AlcaLu and Euronews: Moody's Has a Downer on AlcaLu.)

EE is to offer the iZettle chip card reader, which effectively turns selected smartphones into basic credit card terminals, in its stores from Thursday. At the moment the gizmo only works with iPhones, iPads and around a dozen upscale Android handsets, but it would seem to offer a possible solution to tradespeople who would like to be able to accept card payments on the move and avoid the "check's in the post" syndrome.

And while we're in EE-land, take a look at this photo of what happens when a joint-venture re-branding isn't really thought through... (See Euronews: 4G Arrives in UK and Euronews: EE 4G Plan Gets Thumbs-Up.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading