Alcatel- Lucent announces new strategic plans
Friday, 12 December 2008, 23:29 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Paris/Bangalore: Alcatel-Lucent has announced its strategic plan to enable service providers, enterprises and end-users to take greater advantage and gain more value out of today's web environment as well as its next evolution. The company's plan is to combine the trusted capabilities of the network environment with the creative communications services of the web (Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond). This transformation will allow billions of customers to use millions of websites from any device guaranteeing security, quality, privacy and billing integrity. The overall service experience for end-users - consumers and businesses - will be improved and greater value will be created for every player in the industry. This strategy requires providing an open environment, which does not exist today, where all these trusted capabilities can be available between the network and "over-the-top" applications typical of Web 2.0. Alcatel-Lucent will undergo a major strategic transformation and will take some significant steps to realign its operations. The company will be focusing on three markets: service providers, enterprises, and selected verticals and on four key areas of investment: IP, Optical, mobile and fixed Broadband and Applications enablement. "We will work closely with our service provider, enterprise customers and applications providers to make this strategic transformation happen. We want to stimulate a sustainable business model for the industry that will fuel innovation and the capital investment required to expand the overall web experience to more people and businesses," said Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. The company will also accelerate the shift of investments towards next-generation platforms by reinforcing areas of leadership, boosting investment in focus areas and by streamlining its product offerings on mature portfolios such as CDMA 1x, GSM, ATM, ADSL, DLC and legacy applications. Moreover, Alcatel-Lucent will initiate a set of strong actions designed to reduce the company's break-even point by Euro 1 billion per year in both 2009 and 2010. The company also expects to reduce the number of managers by approximately 1,000 and the number of contractors by approximately 5,000. For full year 2009, Alcatel-Lucent expects the market for telecommunications equipment and related deployment services to be down between 8 percent and 12 percent at constant exchange rate and expects to maintain a stable market share. As a result of the expected decline in volumes and given that the improvement in gross margin will only materialize towards the end of the year, the company's initial forecast is to achieve an adjusted operating profit around break-even in 2009.
Source: IANS
siliconindia