Nokia said it was hiring 150 new staff for its main factory in Finland, bucking the growing trend among mobile handset makers to move production facilities out into the far East, to countries with cheaper costs of labour.
The world's leading mobile phone manufacturer said it was adding to its workforce in Finland in response to strong demand for it products. Volumes of mobile phone shipments are growing well, the company said.
The factory in Salo, to the west of Helsinki, currently employs about 2,000 people and focuses on the higher end of Nokia's range of products, including the N-gage gaming console, which hits the shops next week.
One of the reasons for taking on extra staff, Nokia said, was to ensure that it could quickly ramp up production of these types of products for the Christmas market.
The move comes after a sweeping management and operational restructuring last week, which saw the company's three business divisions split into four in an effort to bolster its position in an increasingly competitive mobile handset market.
The decision to hire more staff in Europe is in sharp contrast to moves by rivals such as Ericsson and Motorola, which have over the last few year increased the amount of production that is outsourced to companies to Asian companies, such as Taiwan's Flextronics.
Nokia also has outsourcing deals in lower-cost Asian countries, but said its manufacturing decisions were not diven simply by the search for cheap labour.
"When you optimise your manufacturing and logistics operations the cost of labour is not the most crucial factor that determines where your phones are produced," Nokia said.
Nokia has cut some 2,350 jobs at its troubled Networks unit this year, but has not made any substantial cuts at its profitable handsets unit, which accounts for about 80 per cent of its business.
Nokia had a total staff of 51,800 people at the end of June.
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