Making evident attempts to bring down its costs as well as to speed up its push into the smartphone arena, Sony Corp announced on Thursday that it intends slashing nearly 15 percent of the workforce of its Sony Mobile business between now and March 2014.

According to Sony, the job-cuts - which will affect almost 1,000 employees - will chiefly affect the staff working at the headquarters of Sony Mobile in Lund, Sweden.

The job-cut announcement by Sony comes after the company’s earlier-this-year $1.47 billion deal that gave it full ownership of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications company – Sony’s mobile-phone joint venture with Sweden-based Telefon AB L. M. Ericsson – which it renamed Sony Mobile.

Meanwhile, in addition to the job-cuts, Sony also said in the announcement that it will be re-locating the Sony Mobile headquarters from Lund to Tokyo in October, chiefly with the objective of integrating the company’s smartphones with its Sony products and content offerings.

About the job-cuts and the headquarter relocation, Kunimasa Suzuki – Sony Mobile’s president and CEO – said in a statement that the changes will essentially enable Sony’s mobile-phone business to quickly integrate and converge with the wider Sony Group.

Noting that the result of the announced moves will be “a more focused and efficient operational structure” of Sony Mobile, Suzuki further said that the changes “will help to reduce Sony Mobile’s costs, enhance time to market efficiency and bring the business back to a place of strength.”