Word: lucent
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...little wonder that in these unstable times companies ranging from Lucent to Xerox to Gillette have recently sent their CEOs packing. There hasn't been much public talk of pushing Armstrong out--he will remain chairman and CEO of AT&T--in part because the breakup will be tough enough without a change in leadership. But this is almost certainly Armstrong's last real chance to turn things around. With AT&T stock down 57% this year, shareholders won't be willing to wait on hold forever...
Executives at Lucent Technologies, the New Jersey telecom-equipment maker, couldn't help noticing this year that CEO Richard McGinn had morphed from an outgoing, hands-on boss who ate lunch in the cafeteria to a withdrawn figure bunkered in his office. Perhaps retreat was in order. After three otherwise successful years at the helm, McGinn had committed a series of screw-ups. Among them: missing out on optical-equipment investments that Lucent's competitors later cleaned up on and avoiding layoffs in spite of declining sales. Two weeks ago, he delivered really bad news: the current quarter's revenue...
...that's not where the money was. Popular techland has been a disaster. Last week the NASDAQ yo-yo busted its string and fell to a new low for the year, extending a slump in the most speculative stocks and grounding the likes of Intel, Dell, Cisco and Lucent...
...investing backdrop hasn't been this frightening since 1990. An eroding wealth effect could hurt consumer confidence, while a surging dollar is taking a bite out of the earnings of U.S. multinationals. Among companies sending up earnings flags: Home Depot, Yahoo, Lucent, Intel, Kodak, Dell and DuPont. Meanwhile, renewed hostilities in the Middle East are pushing oil prices higher, threatening to stoke inflation...
...This would of course be AT&T's third go-round with de-glomeration - the government took the hammer to them in 1984, and the company spun off Lucent and shed NCR in 1996. (And the track record is a bit frightening: Lucent has gone from $79 to $22 inside of a year, issued three - three! - profit warnings and this weekend fired its CEO.) The idea is to keep the company nimble in a shifting-sands technological landscape by letting each division act on its own, pursuing its own innovations, deals and profitability...