Word: lucent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most of 2000, once-high-flying telecom equipment maker Lucent Technologies was the poster child for Internet depression. A high-tech AT&T spinoff that, as CEO Henry Schacht went around saying this winter, tried too hard to be a high-speed, high-growth dot-com, Lucent has gone from highly regarded - mentioned in the same bellwether breath as Cisco, Intel and Microsoft - to highly suspect...
...January 2000, with its stock near $80 a share, Lucent delivered its first self-inflicted blow: First-quarter earnings would fall short of Wall Street expectations. Another warning came in July about the fourth quarter. In October, the company fired its CEO and warned about its next report, and in December new CEO Schacht announced that Lucent would have to go back and cut revenues by $679 million for the fiscal year that had ended three months before. These days the stock is somewhere in the high teens...
...investigating that very fiasco. The specifics are mostly dry accounting stuff, and are being held pretty close to the agency's vest at this point - but the Wall Street Journal reports that "commission staff are investigating Lucent's procedures for booking sales, in particular its use of 'nonrecurring credits,' or one-time discounts, given to customers, as well as Lucent's accounting treatment of software-licensing agreements...
...Which was one of the things that got Lucent into trouble in the first place. Eager to keep impressing Wall Street with steroidal growth numbers and counting all manner of nascent start-ups and emerging companies among its potential customers, Lucent apparently developed a habit over the years of goosing up its sales with so-called vendor-financing arrangements, in which Lucent would lend customers the money to buy equipment and sometimes install...
...obviously in a comatose state. You saw this from Thursday's NAPM (National Association of Purchasing Management) report, which actually showed that the sector is in a recession, and in the unemployment report it's apparent that most of the layoffs are coming from this area. Telecom manufacturers like Lucent, carmakers like DaimlerChrysler - these are the layoffs that are making all the headlines, and this sector is what's pushing up the unemployment numbers...