TELECOM: FT, REORGANISATION MAKES COMPANY MORE &#39;NORMAL&#39;
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(AGI) - Rome, Italy, Dec. 8 - The merger between Telecom Italia and its mobile arm, Tim, will make the company more normal and will sign the &quot;end of the biggest Italian soap opera&quot;.
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Alcatel-Lucent said it plans further layoffs after its post-merger financial performance continued to disappoint.The company fleshed out its three-point plan for restoring profitability on Wednesday, including a renewed focus on products to help carriers transform their networks to an all-IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure, a move from products to value-added services, and a more streamlined organization with fewer staff in support functions to eliminate post-merger duplication. It will cut a further 4,000 jobs by 2009, in addition to the thousands it has already shed, and hopes the moves will save it a further &#8364;400 million (around $575 million) by that date, it said.In another change, Alcatel will reduce its senior management team to seven members, from 11, and&#160;Chief Financial Officer Jean-Pascal Beaufret will leave, to be replaced by enterprise systems group head Hubert de Pesquidoux.Alcatel-Lucent&#39;s board has expressed its disappointment with the&#160;decline in performance&#160;since the Dec. 1&#160;merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies, but expressed its continued support for CEO Patricia Russo earlier this month. Russo has the board&#39;s support for her plan to restore the company to profitability, she said Wednesday.&quot;It&#39;s not a plan solely focused on cost. It&#39;s also focused on growth,&quot; she said in a conference call with analysts.As part of the plan, the company will simplify its regional structure, dividing the world into just two regions, the Americas and the rest. It will also pull out of between 10 and 20 countries where its margins are too slim to make a profit, Russo said. In those countries it will pursue &quot;an alternative strategy where we can continue to support customers but through different means,&quot; she said.For the quarter ended Sept. 30, the company reported revenue of &#8364;4.35 billion, a fall of 11.4 percent compared to the &#8364;4.91 billion that the two companies made a year earlier. Alcatel-Lucent provided comparable figures for the companies&#39; performance before their merger on Dec. 1.Currency fluctuations hurt the company&#39;s performance: the decline in revenue would have been 7.8 percent at constant exchange rates.Alcatel Lucent remains in the red, with a loss of &#8364;345 million this quarter, or &#8364;258 million excluding restructuring charges, compared to a comparable net profit of &#8364;532 million for the companies a year earlier.Alcatel-Lucent is still hoping for a &quot;solid ramp up in revenue&quot; in the fourth quarter, but seems less optimistic: it now says revenue for the full year will remain flat, rather than &quot;flat or slightly up&quot; as it predicted last month. The company offered no guidance on earnings for the full year.Revenue from the company&#39;s largest business segment, carrier networks, dropped 15.2 percent year on year to &#8364;3.14 billion, while operating profit for the segment fell from &#8364;389 million to &#8364;22 million. Alcatel-Lucent said the decline was exaggerated by the comparison with unusually strong sales of CDMA (code division multiple access) wireless networks in North America in the third quarter last year, as operators rushed to deploy a performance-enhancing software upgrade.The company has converged two of its three CDMA platforms since the start of the year, and expects to merge the remaining two by the third quarter of next year, Russo said. Going forward, it will focus research and development spending on new revenue opportunities such as the transformation of wireless networks to all-IP systems.As part of its restructuring, the company will eliminate a layer of management, merging the wireless, wireline and convergence networks divisions of the carrier networks business segment.Services revenue remained flat at &#8364;777 million, while operating profit in that sector fell to &#8364;40 million from &#8364;60 million a year earlier. The company sees services around the delivery of IPTV (Internet Protocol television) programming as a strong area.One bright spot was the company&#39;s enterprise networks business, where revenue rose to &#8364;380 million from &#8364;362 million a year earlier, with operating profit rising to &#8364;29 million from &#8364;24 million a year earlier. The move by businesses from traditional switched telephone systems to VOIP (voice over IP) on internal networks was a key driver, the company said.This article was updated with new information on October 31, 2007.
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Telecom Italia, in a reversal of a recent and expensive consolidation, announced plans to spin off its fixed-line and mobile phone businesses into two companies.
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ComReg report shows strong summer uptake ComReg has released its quarterly report which shows strong broadband take-up over the summer months contributed to total telecoms revenues of â¬1.06bn for the period.â¦
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According to research agency Gartner, the country will be the highest growth market for telecommunications with around 3.5 crore new subscribers being added in 2005.
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TELECOMS giant BT yesterday said it was parting company with one of the architects of its transformation from a fixed-line operator.
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Investors in Cable and Wireless have been told by the UK&#39;s largest shareholder body that they had to make up their own minds about whether the telecoms company&#39;s controversial pay scheme met corporate governance best practice.
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AT&T today announced layoffs affecting more than 20% of its workforce, far higher than the 8% it had said earlier in the year would be laid off.
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Britain might relax rules about the  speed at which mobile phone operators have to build out  third-generation (3G) networks as part of a radical overhaul to  throw open the highly-regulated market for radio frequencies.
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Deutsche Telekom is changing its  management structure after poor quarterly results revealed that  Europe's biggest telecoms group by sales was no longer growing  in its German home market.
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The two companies do not operate in all the same markets, but Monday's warnings seemed to suggest that both were suffering from tougher competition in some areas.
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The telecommunications giant finished its first full year as a merged company with a net loss of 3.52 billion euros, or $5.1 billion, mostly on charges, and it predicted a loss for the current quarter.
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Telecom Corp., New Zealand&#39;s largest phone company, probably increased first-quarter profit 14 percent as it spent more on marketing and cut prices to lure customers to its mobile and high-speed Internet services.
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New rules should make it easier for UK net users to switch broadband suppliers.
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"It should improve their internal efficiency and give new opportunities moving more into the services world, where naturally software is very important."  The world's biggest mobile handset firm, Nokia, has announced a reorganisation aimed at taking advantage of future growth areas and increasing its efficiency. via Manawatu Evening Standard
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Leading wireless phone provider sets subscriber bar a little higher.
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A: Combining the two companies&#39; networks should result in clearer calls, fewer dropped calls during peak hours and broader availability of coverage.