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Jobs to go at UK mobile phone distributor

Graeme Wearden ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Mar 2001 09:53 GMT

An "significant" number of staff at European Telecom are to lose their jobs because of the slowdown in the mobile phone sector.

The Slough-based mobile phone distributor warned on Thursday that it expected to record a loss for the last financial year. The current difficult conditions in the mobile sector were blamed by European Telecom for the decision to lay off an undisclosed number of its 600 staff. European Telecom has also suffered recent disruption as it upgraded parts of its system.

The mobile sector has seen a series of job cuts in recent weeks. Industry giant Motorola announced 7,000 job cuts earlier this week, fuelling fears of a slump in the mobile phone sector.

European Telecom's announcement came a day after mobile network operator Vodafone warned that official statistics for the number of mobile phone users have been overstated by as much as ten percent.

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