Nortel hitches its wagon to 3G on the road to recovery

摘要

Nortel networks' history over the past few years is a tale of the heady days of the last decade and how the party came to a crashing halt three years ago. Once the largest company on the Toronto Stock Exchange in terms of market capitalization, with more than 110,000 employees at its peak in the late 90s, Nortel is now a pale shadow of its former self. The vendor has let go more than 60,000 employees and is now just another company on the TSE. Nortel's plight is indicative of the pain and suffering of the entire telecoms industry. The company, along with some of its big competitors like Ericsson, Alcatel, Lucent, Nokia and Motorola, has endured the aftermath of the bursting of the telecoms bubble. Nortel has now overhauled its entire upper management and is on the road to recovery. Having flirted with declaring bankruptcy, the company is perhaps in the best shape of all its peers in terms of business recovery. Leading this slow and painful recovery is Nortel's wireless business. The company was not a very significant player in the 2G era and had middling success because it was always perceived to be a North American player and hence missed out on the GSM party. Although Nortel has prided itself on its very deep and extensive portfolio of fixed-line and enterprise products, its wireless division is now the leader in terms of overall revenues and accounted for more than 41% of the company's C$2.4 billion (US$1.7 billion) revenues in the last quarter. Wireless equipment revenues as a business segment were approximately 11% of its total global revenues last year, a figure that is likely to show a strong increase given Nortel's success this year in winning wireless business.