PARIS (Reuters) - Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia said on Wednesday it could cut 597 jobs in France by end-2019 as part of a plan to save 1.2 billion euros at group level.
The job cuts would concern central and support functions within Alcatel-Lucent International and Nokia Solutions Networks France, which employ a combined 4,200 people in the country, a Nokia spokeswoman told Reuters in an e-mail.
R&D functions were excluded from the plan and Nokia, which bought former rival Alcatel-Lucent in 2016, will seek to limit as much a possible forced redundancies, she said.
The CFDT, CFE-CGC, CGT, and CFTC unions said the plan was "unacceptable" and asked for a meeting at the Economy Ministry.
The Ministry told Reuters it would convene in the coming weeks a committee made of union and company representatives to monitor the issue.
(Reporting by Gwenaelle Barzic, Dominique Vidalon, Cyril Altmeyer and Yann Le Guernigou; editing by John Irish)
