Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), thinks that he won't need to resort to the massive job cuts that its main rival Nokia Siemens Networks has undertaken to regain its footing.
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In an interview with French newspaper Les Echos, Verwaayen said that he's confident that his company is in a much better place than its Finnish-German competitor.
"There's no way we are cutting our staff by 25 percent," he said. "We are in a different situation because we have quickly turned towards the network technologies of the future."
In November NSN announced that it would make wireless the sole focus of the company and sell off non-core assets like its access division to ADTRAN. At the same time, the vendor announced it would lay off 17,000 employees by 2013, an effort it believes will save it €1 billion ($1.3 billion.)
On the wireline side, Alcatel-Lucent continues to benefit from service provider's ongoing migration to fiber-based technologies in the last mile network, like GPON. In addition, it signed up a number of 100G optical networking contracts with the likes of France Telecom/Orange (NYSE: FTE), P&TLuxembourg, T-Mobile Czech Republic, and Canadian cable MSO Shaw Communications (NYSE: SJR).
Despite the progress it has made, Alcatel-Lucent is facing mounting pressure to improve its financial performance. The vendor announced in November that it plans to cut $691 million in costs this year.
For more:
- Reuters has this article
- here's FierceWireless' take
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