Alcatel and Lucent announced their merger deal this morning, a combination that signals the unofficial kick-off of what will probably be a vigorous round of consolidation in the communications tech sector. Although the company will be headquartered in Paris, it will be led by an American (and female!) CEO Patricia Russo, who is currently the Chairman/CEO of Lucent.
The merged tech giant will have a market cap of around $36 billion and annual revenues of around $25 billion, based on 2005 revenues, and count around 88,000 employees, although plans call for cutting the combined workforce by 10%. The annual “cost synergies” the companies expect to achieve with the merger are estimated to be around $1.7 billion within three years following the deal’s close.
One quirk with this merger is the French incorporation and high level of French government ownership of the new company — Lucent’s Bell Labs conducts sensitive research for the U.S. military and security agencies and will set up a separate, independent U.S. arm that works on those government contracts.
Stay tuned for more mergers as tech suppliers cope with the increasing consolidation in their telco customer base. Nortel, Siemens, Ericsson and other top communications tech companies are all in deep talks about how to stay alive as their phone company customers get bigger and become more potent negotiators.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney has this excellent overview of how the Internet is changing election politics, particularly for Democrats. Email, web sites, blogs, podcasting and text messaging are brand new tools that the til-now stodgy political establishment are embracing with rapidity, diminishing the importance of the all-powerful political TV advertising campaigns.
Bloggers play a particular role in this transformation — Democrat Mark Warner kicked off his presidential campaign effort by hiring a top blogging expert Jerome Armstrong.
What the parties and the candidates are undergoing now is in many ways similar to what has happened in other sectors of the nation — including the music industry, newspapers and retailing — as they try to adjust to, and take advantage of, the Internet as its influence spreads across American society. To a considerable extent, they are responding to, and playing catch up with, bloggers who have demonstrated the power of their forums to harness the energy on both sides of the ideological divide.
As the piece points out, the Internet is used for good and bad by both political parties. Not only is the web used to disseminate information, rally voters and gain backers, it is also a prime medium for engaging in negative campaigning, with web sites set up to attack opponents and “decoy” sites established to distribute damaging information.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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