The Swedish-Finnish telecom giant TeliaSonera on Wednesday posted decline in sales and profit in the third quarter.

In the third quarter the group's net sales was 25.8 billion Swedish kronor (about 3.9 billion U.S. dollars), a decrease of 3.2 percent compared to the same period last year while net profit amounted to 5.1 billion Swedish kronor (about 774 million U.S dollars), shrinking by 9 percent.

Meanwhile the company announced to lay off 2,000 employees, 7 percent of the group's total workforce, over the coming two years as part of its cost reduction plan of 2 billion Swedish kronor (about 303 million U.S. dollars).

According to Lars Nyberg, president and CEO of TeliaSonera, adding that the company was experiencing "weakness in service revenue" in many of their markets.

"Our cost base is today growing at a higher rate than our revenues and we have to reverse this trend," said Nyberg.

"Our customers' behaviour is changing rapidly and we must change our business models from being voice to data centric," he added.

The company launched new subscriptions in Sweden in September and also had adjusted data prices to better meet the growing demand for data communication.

Besides, Nyberg expected the organic growth of the company to be 0 to 1 percent in 2012.