Troubled Telecoms: Alcatel-Lucent Job Cut Protest 15 October 2013, by Lori Hinnant

Troubled telecoms: Alcatel-Lucent job cut protest 15 October 2013, by Lori Hinnant

Wearing black trash bags marked with crosses, the inventor of the telephone. more than a thousand Alcatel-Lucent workers marched to the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday, staging a Other phone companies facing difficulties: mock funeral that the chief executive warned could easily become a reality for a company with its roots BLACKBERRY in the earliest days of the telephone. The one-time leader in smartphones published The employees were protesting Alcatel-Lucent's Tuesday an open letter in journals around the world plans to cut 10,000 jobs around the world and save to reassure customers. Blackberry has been laid 1 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in costs. Like many low by a new generation of touchscreen phones, former pioneers of the communications industry, starting with the iPhone in 2007. It has yet to Alcatel-Lucent is having a hard time adapting to recover and lost $1 billion in the last quarter alone. seismic technological shifts. NOKIA "This company could disappear," CEO Michel Combes told Europe 1 radio on Tuesday ahead of Microsoft reached a deal earlier this year to buy the protest that ended at Alcatel-Lucent Nokia's mobile phone business for $7.2 billion. Both headquarters near Paris' most famous monument. companies were once dominant and are now trying "This company hasn't made money since 2006." to rebrand and claw back market share.

Combes blamed bad decision-making since the MOTOROLA 2006 merger of France's Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent Technologies, such as abandoning high- Google Inc. paid $12.4 billion last year for Motorola growth countries, a lack of innovation and a failure Mobility. Kagan said Google's dominance in the to make the leap to new cell technology, such as tech world will insulate Motorola from some of the 3G. pressures faced by competitors.

Jeff Kagan, an analyst who follows Alcatel-Lucent © 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. from the U.S., said the company focused too much on voice technology while the industry was "quickly evolving into a data space" instead.

"I don't think they can transform the industry, and they haven't done a great job of transforming themselves," Kagan said.

Combes took over in April and faces resistance from the French government, which has warned it could try to block, or delay the planned layoffs.

The company's troubles are in sharp contrast to the glory days of Bell Labs, Lucent's research arm, which won seven Noble Prizes and whose earliest iteration was founded by Alexander Graham Bell,

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