Nokia announces new cost-cutting plan after its Q3 profits drops 27%

 Telecom network equipment maker Nokia on Thursday announced a new cost-cutting programme after reporting quarterly profits down 27 percent from a year ago.

The Finnish company, rival to Sweden's Ericsson and China's Huawei, said it was targeting annual cost savings of 700 million euros by the end of 2020, without elaborating the scale of expected job reductions.

Nokia will this year complete a 1.2 billion euro cost-saving programme launched after its 2016 acquisition of Franco-American Alcatel-Lucent.

Nokia's third-quarter non-IFRS operating profit came in at 487 million euros ($555 million), broadly in line with analysts' mean forecast of 492 million euros in a Reuters poll.