Sunday, April 02, 2006
Alcatel, Lucent and Canada
It's a deal... Lucent and Alcatel have tied the knot and will be merging to form a US$25B telecom giant.The merged company, to be headed up by Lucent president Pat Russo will be cutting about 8800 jobs - 10% of the current workforce - and some of those are possibly going to be in Ottawa. Although on one hand, the public statements boast that the combined company will have "The industry's premier R&D capabilities, including Bell Labs, with 26,100 R&D engineers and scientists throughout the world", the press release indicates that savings will:
... come from several areas, including consolidating support functions, optimizing the supply chain and procurement structure, leveraging R&D and services across a larger base, and reducing the combined worldwide workforce by approximately 10 percent.
Bell Labs will continue to be headquartered in New Jersey and Lucent is preserving certain corporate structures in order to continue to fulfill US Government obligations for some strategic contracts. Other corporate structures are also being created to fulfill French requirements.
There is an opportunity for Canada to grow its role in the combined company as global mandates are defined during the integration activities. It seems to me that some locations will be winners and some will be losers. Winners will perform R&D for the combined entity and will see their budgets (and staff counts) grow; losers will see some of their staff offered jobs elsewhere and the rest let go.
Our governments - federal and provincial - have created incentives to keep auto and airplane assembly lines open. We'll soon see where telecom R&D, Ottawa's technology core, fits into Canada's industrial priorities.
Posted by Mark Goldberg @ 4/02/2006 11:59:00 AM 
Syndicate
