Nokia, the Finland-based telecom equipment maker, has confirmed that it plans to cut around 1,233 hobs at its subsidiary Alcatel Lucent International. The number of jobs cited accounts for about one-third of the company’s workforce.

Currently, Alcatel Lucent International has about 3,640 employees. Of the total 1,233 jobs being cut, 831 jobs belong to the Nozay site, and 402 jobs belong to the Lannion site. Nokia France affiliate companies, including Radio Frequency Systems, Nokia Bell Labs France, and Alcatel Submarine Networks aren’t affected by the job cuts.

The development comes as the acquisition condition of not cutting the French jobs for at least five years is about the expire. This raises the question if Nokia intended to take this step as soon as it was allowed to or if the company is just trying to accommodate as per the market conditions.

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However, Nokia has said in a statement that staff reduction is a necessary move because of the significant cost pressures. In the month of April, Nokia had said that the company planned to cut costs by 500 million euros by the end of this year, with 350 million euros targeted to come from operating expenses and 150 million from sales costs.

Nokia acquired the France-based Alcatel Lucent for €15.6 billion to strengthen its position in the market. During the acquisition, the French government was pretty clear about saving French jobs and put up a condition that Nokia would not cut French jobs for at least five years after the acquisition, the period which is about to expire.

The company is competing against the like of Huawei and Ericsson in the telecom equipment space. The job cuts at Nokia come at a time when it is the only company among the “big five” whose R&D investments have declined over the past years but it is higher than the other four when compared to the revenue.

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New returnee, Nokia is already making waves in the smartphone sector but its not what you think. We are yet to see the expected Nokia Android-powered smartphone but the company is in the news because it recently filed multiple lawsuits against Apple. According to reports, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent have jointly instituted a major legal battle with rival company, Apple. This has seen the company filing lawsuits in Germany and the US on grounds of infringement of 32 of their patents by Apple.

A statement issued by Nokia reveals the patents include several technologies ranging from display, user interface, software, antenna, chipsets, to video coding. The lawsuits filed in the US were done in a federal court in East Texas which has a long history of favoring patent owners. No details on the lawsuit filed in Germany was given. But the The US lawsuit , on the other hand, includes 10 patents with most of them originating from Nokia, while at least one originated from Lucent Technologies. Make no mistake, Alcatel-Lucent was acquired by Nokia last year.

This isn’t the first time Nokia and Apple are getting into legal battle with each other as both companies had fought major legal battles between 2009 and 2011. The lawsuits back then spanned the globe but were seeming settled in 2011 with both parties reaching a settlement in 2011 that saw Nokia raking in hundreds of millons of Euros. Both parties are back in the trenches, though, as Nokia said in a statement today that Apple refused to license “other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products.” Perhaps those patented inventions were not offered as part of the 2011 agreement.

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The Nokia lawsuit lists infringement by virtually every version of iPhone, including the latest iPhone 7 down to iPhone 3GS. The iPad Pro and every version of iPad Air and iPad Mini, as well as the Apple Watch, Apple TV, and services like Find My iPhone and Find my iPad were also listed to have infringed on Nokia’s patent rights. Even the acclaimed Apple Siri featured in iOS 10 is said to have infringed on a patent it acquired from Alcatel-Lucent.

On its own part, Apple has also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Nokia in a federal court in San Jose, accusing the Finnish company of distributing its patent to so-called “patent trolls”, better known as patent assertion companies (PAE). The massive patent distribution to PAE is in order “to maximize the aggregate royalties that can be extracted from product companies,” Apple lawyers allege. One of the alleged PAE is Acacia Research Corp., which won a $22.1 million verdict against Apple in June.

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This is not doubt going to be a long legal battle between both companies but note that it isn’t going to affect the release of the much expected Nokia Android phone which would herald the return of the Nokia brand into the smartphone market. Nokia has already sold its mobile phone business to Finnish company HMD Global Oy and all is going on as planned.

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