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Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10,000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker's newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late."
What does the last link have to do with the submission?
Refocus on some vague next gen thing.
Where have we seen this movie before?
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Couldn't agree more. Unless you are cutting some CEOs and directors.
"We will cut 100k ppl because... cloud....4g.....outsourcing....smartsizing"
*Shareholders applauding to buzzwords*
In India; Alcatel makes smartphones for Idea Cellular; and they are quite good. Very rugged; good specs; fairly low cost - $120 for a 5" smartphone.
Wonder if this move is to get eventually swallowed like Nokia - except the CxOs; nobody else benefits.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This is the CEO implementing the classic death spiral - reduce employees rapidly to get a few good financial quarters until the customers desert. It can be difficult and expensive for customers to change vendors so you have time to collect enormous sums before the eventual collapse of earnings. I hear there is even a Harvard business school class on how to convert a dying company's assets to personal wealth.
Companies will continue to test their breaking point.
while(company == alive)
{
if (company == ok)
fire_employees(X);
else
hire_employees(Y);
}
sell_assets(Z);
deploy_parachute();
Take the assets of a struggling company, combine them those of another struggling company, and combine both of those with a third struggling company and what do you get?
A blue chip stock, that's what! Definitely time to hand out performance bonuses to top management.
Alcatel-Lucent has been hemorrhaging jobs for what feels longer than a decade. Time to just close up shop and put all the assets on the chopping block.
A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs. You know, Unix, the transistor, one of the last corporate-funded basic research institutes... It kind of makes me want to have the old AT&T monopoly back just to have that.
Admittedly, they probably do have huge legacy costs in the form of less productive employees and products that don't make them as much money anymore. Also, the telecom landscape has changed a lot over the years. I work for a similar company, and while our group works on newish stuff, there's a ton of older products just sitting around that used to be very high margin and no longer have the revenue to support their costs.
That said, it's never good when an older, established company suddenly announces a monster layoff like this. In the older companies, you just know it's going to be 10,000 58-year-olds in the developed countries who will suddenly find themselves out of work with zero prospects for new employment, hanging on until Social Security kicks in. That's the sad part of these "smartsizings" -- when you're just a number in a spreadsheet, companies have no idea how much you still have to offer in terms of talent and experience. I'm approaching the ripe old age of 40 now, and am constantly staying on top of all the new stuff just to keep the skill set sharp. That's one thing I could do without in the IT "profession" -- so much new buzzwordy stuff is rehashes of technology decades old with better supporting technology. Too bad Gartner and their ilk are the only ones that CIOs listen to!
Unless you're in senior management, you have absolutely no control over your future. I can do the best job, get top ratings for performance, but if I'm unlucky and am working on the wrong projects... poof no job. Layoffs are done by cutting whole programs, without even attempting to retain the best talent. We're chattel, nameless drones who are viewed as necessary evils. Worse, I may be potentially viewed as substandard by future employers because the product I was working on wasn't viable, as though I had any opportunity to influence it's direction.
I truly enjoy writing software, but I would never recommend this career to my children or grandchildren. Way too much volatility coupled with abusive employers...
(Alcatel-)Lucent involved in a new massive layoff? It's another 90s revival. The scars never quite healed from starting my career there in the 90s.
I see the marketroid who typed up the press release accidentally put a 'f' in there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
'Shaft Plan' was a little too insensitive.
If you post it, they will read.
Laid off employee shows up on Wheel of Fortune. "Thanks, Jack, I'd like to sell an 'R'..."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
SHIT PLAN.
Oooooh. Someone else said it, but I don't have any followup, just wanted to do that one bit and this bit after it.
Government is not 100% stable, but it is far more stable than other alternatives.
You say Shit Can... I say Shift Plan!
In India; Alcatel makes smartphones for Idea Cellular; and they are quite good. Very rugged; good specs; fairly low cost - $120 for a 5" smartphone.
Wonder if this move is to get eventually swallowed like Nokia - except the CxOs; nobody else benefits.
My understanding is that they have only lent their name to the phones and don't actually have anything to do with them but are made by a 3rd party.
Yet another purge at a technology company. I used to try to keep a list of them. How can there be a shortage of technology-industry workers with all the layoffs, firings, and purges that are constantly going on?
A friend of mine told me it looks pretty much like the Glangarry Gleen Ross movie inside there. " Get MAD you sob! get MAD! ". "Do you know what it takes to sell ALU products? it takes BRASS BALLS to sell ALU products." From high tech breakthrough patents to web banners customization sw. Way to go.
I work at Alcatel-Lucent in the U.S., and as of mid-afternoon today, we've heard absolutely nothing official about this. Even my boss only knows about the layoffs from the same news outlets I read before work this morning.
it is misspelled its shit plan
I worked for ATT when Bell Labs was spun off as Lucent by Fiorina (worse CEO that an American company can have). Lucent was loaded with bright ppl and great technology. If Google can buy the patents, it will make sense for them to buy Lucent.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would you seem surprised that they haven't bothered telling you yet? Is this your first big corporate rodeo? Every company that I have ever worked for never tells us, the workers, shit about what is going. It gets people panicky. They get depressed and lower output. They get pissed off and steal or sabotage equipment. Some even get super pissed and come to work armed for a good old fashioned game of Postal. I have typically always heard about what was happening to me from the news before managment bothered to "officially" annouce it. Your employer will even probably deny it for a week or so until they just can't hide it. But you know what answers you'll get from them when you specifically ask them "Will I be geting laid off?" They'll just say "we just don't know yet," "we have some plans still up in the air so we can't speculate," "we're doing everything we can," and a whole host of other PHB talk. Do you know when you will "officially" find out you're getting the axe? EXACTLY 2 weeks before your layoff date. Not one minute sooner.
Acatel-Lucent did mortgage its patents to Goldman-Sachs. One need a long fork when having diner with the devil, and I am not sure their is long enough.