Alcatel and Lucent shareholders back merger
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PARIS/NEW YORK  - Alcatel CGEP.PA and Lucent   LU.N on Thursday moved closer to tying the knot after their   shareholders backed the French telecoms equipment group's $10.9   billion all-share acquisition of its U.S. rival.
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(InfoWorld) - Alcatel-Lucent, a global communications giant with combined annual revenue of more than US$24 billion, will debut Friday after a sometimes rocky engagement between Alcatel SA and Lucent Technologies Inc. The deal closed Thursday,Â about eight months after it was announcedÂ and followingÂ national security concerns,Â investor lawsuitsÂ and one close shareholder vote. On Friday, the company is set to begin trading on the Euronext Paris exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ALU. Both companies were among the largest suppliers of wired and wireless infrastructure, and the combined entity boasts impressive statistics: 79,000 employees in 130 countries, about 23,000 of whom work in research and development, a services team of more than 18,000, and customer relationships with the 100 largest service providers in the world. The consolidation comes as carriers, the consumers of telecommunications gear, also combine into fewer and bigger entities. The new company will be incorporated in France and based in Paris but run by Chief Executive Officer Patricia Russo, the American outgoing chief of Lucent. Alcatel head Serge Tchuruk is a non-executive chairman of the board. Both were appointed Thursday. Bell Labs, Lucent's venerable research unit, will remain in New Jersey and a special business will be set up to handle sensitive U.S. government contracts. Alcatel will sell its satellite business to ease national security concerns in France. The deal came under fire from some investment firms and shareholders. In September, Lucent settled two proposed class-action lawsuits by investors that threatened to delay its shareholder vote, and the deal then passed with less than 52 percent of the vote. The last key hurdle was approval by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment In the U.S. (CFIUS), which earlier this month signed off on the deal on the condition that the companies execute national security agreements with certain U.S. government agencies. Alcatel-Lucent expects to gain significant savings within three years from cutting about 9,000 jobs, consolidating support functions, optimizing its supply and procurement system and leveraging its research and services operations across a larger base. The company will discuss the news on a webcast on Friday at 1 p.m. Central European Time (12 p.m. GMT).
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Alcatel-Lucent will shed 12,500 jobs or 16 percent of staff, more than expected, as a result of its complex transatlantic merger and it sees tough times ahead with another dip in sales in the first quarter.
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(InfoWorld) - Alcatel-Lucent has invested in WiMax chip maker Sequans Communications, the latest show of support for the emerging long-range wireless networking technology. The companies did not reveal the size of the investment but said it extends a $24 million round of financing that Sequans raised last year. The companies are both based in France and have worked together in the past. Last year they said they would make a low-cost end-user WiMax device for developing countries. They expect to start production of that product in the second quarter. Alcatel, whichÂ completed its merger with LucentÂ late last year, has alsoÂ worked with Intel, a Sequans competitor. Alcatel and Intel have said often that they would collaborate on the development of WiMax technologies, including field trials of new products. Before the merger, Lucent sold WiMax products using gear from Alvarion, which uses Intel chips. Intel worked aggressively to develop a market for WiMax. Nonetheless, other chip makers including Sequans, Fujitsu, and Wavesat have emerged as competitors. Motorola also invested an undisclosed sum in Sequans late last year. After years of development, WiMax is just beginning to pick up steam. U.S. operator Sprint NextelÂ intends to build a WiMax network, andÂ ClearwireÂ has built several networks in Europe and parts of the U.S.
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(InfoWorld) - Lucent Technologies has averted a potentially embarrassing delay of its shareholder vote on a merger with Alcatel,Â settling two suits by shareholdersÂ who said the deal doesn't maximize shareholder value. Lucent and AlcatelÂ agreed in April to mergeÂ into a global communications vendor that would have about $25 billion in annual revenue. Both companies plan to hold shareholder votes to approve the deal on Thursday. Plaintiffs in Resnick vs. Lucent Technologies Inc. wanted to postpone Lucent's vote, and the company was due at a hearing Wednesday in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Union County to fight that move. Another group of shareholders pursuing a similar suit, Asa R. Maley Trust vs. Lucent, also would have joined the hearing. Now Lucent won't have to face the danger of a legal entanglement the day before its planned vote. Both suits were intended as class actions on behalf of owners of Lucent stock. Terms of the settlement Lucent reached with them will be disclosed later, the company said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The Lucent-Alcatel deal would be one of the biggest shifts yet in the consolidation of both service providers and vendors in the telecommunications industry. Both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission have approved the plan, but it still faces opposition from some investment firms and needs the blessing of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. Lucent is based in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The merged company, to be called Alcatel Lucent, would have its headquarters in Alcatel's base of Paris. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Ericsson and Lucent among the winners
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Alcatel and Lucent Technologies Inc have stepped further down the aisle after their shareholders separately voted in favor of their proposed union whereby the French telecom gear maker would buy its US rival for about $10.9bn.
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Rio Tinto shareholders have backed the Anglo-Australian mining giant&#39;s bid to buy Canada&#39;s Alcan and create the world&#39;s largest aluminium firm, the company said Friday.
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Network equipment companies Alcatel SA  and Lucent Technologies Inc.  said on Thursday they had completed their merger, creating one of the world's biggest suppliers of network equipment for mobile phones and high-speed Internet communications.
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Shareholders in French telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel and US group Lucent were holding separate general assemblies on a merger to create a giant valued at 21.5 billion euros (27 billion dollars).
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Recently-merged Alcatel-Lucent  is stepping up job cuts to 12,500 after dipping into a fourth quarter loss and forecast a sales drop in the first quarter as tough trading and uncertainties related to the tie-up took their toll.
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Alcatel  shareholders on  Thursday approved the French telecoms equipment provider's  all-share acquisition of U.S. rival Lucent , putting an  end to weeks of debates about the deal's merits.
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(InfoWorld) - Nortel Networks reached a definitive agreement to sell its UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) business to Alcatel-Lucent on Monday, locking down a nonbinding agreement announced in September. The Brampton, Ontario, company is selling the 3G (third-generation) infrastructure business so it can focus on developing faster 4G mobile systems and supporting customers with earlier CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technologies. "We didn't have the scale or momentum to be where we wanted to be and to be able to lead in this space," said Richard Lowe, president of Nortel's Mobility and Converged Core Networks unit. The deal is part of an overall restructuring kicked off by President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski after he took over Nortel last year. The company is trying to cut costs to become more competitive and turn around years of poor financial performance. When Nortel signed a memorandum of understanding to sell the UMTS business earlier this year, Alcatel was in the process of closing its merger with Lucent Technologies Inc. Those companies closed their deal and became Alcatel-Lucent last Thursday. What Nortel now has is a binding agreement to sell the UMTS business, which it hopes to close by the end of the month. Alcatel-Lucent will pay US$320 million for the business, minus certain deductions and transaction-related costs. The timing of the agreement just days after the Alcatel-Lucent deal closed was a coincidence, said Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman RÃ©gine Coqueran. About 1,700 employees from Nortel's UMTS unit will move to Alcatel-Lucent, the companies said. That includes substantially all the research and development team and a portion of other employees in other roles such as sales and support, Lowe said. Nortel will now focus its research on what it calls 4G technologies, including WiMax, EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) Revision C, and the LTE (Long-Term Evolution) generations of UMTS, according to Lowe. All these eventually will deliver multiple megabits per second of bandwidth to mobile devices, he said. Â
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XM and Sirius are winning support for their once-controversial merger.
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E-Plus, the German mobile phone unit of Dutch telecoms giant KPN, said Tuesday that it has signed an agreement for Alcatel-Lucent to take over a number of its network divisions.
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Alcatel CGEP.PA shareholders on   Thursday approved the French telecoms equipment provider's   all-share acquisition of U.S. rival Lucent LU.N, putting an   end to weeks of debates about the deal's merits.
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Alcatel-Lucent  and  BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd  said on  Tuesday that they agreed to work together to distribute the  popular smartphones in China.