Lucent Plans To Cut 10,000 Jobs

Wednesday, January 24th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) â€” Troubled telecommunications giant Lucent Technologies plans to cut about 10,000 jobs as part of an effort to reduce its annual costs by more than $2 billion after more than a year of increasingly severe financial and management problems.

The job cuts, which represent nearly 8 percent of its worldwide work force of 125,000, were announced Wednesday as the company reported a $1.02 billion loss from continuing operations for its first fiscal quarter.

The announcements follow a series of earnings disappointments and a sharp decline in Lucent's stock price that drove the company, which was once part of AT&T Corp., to fire its chairman and chief executive in October.

Lucent said Wednesday it will reduce its work force through layoffs and attrition by July, and employees will be notified between now and March.

``With this announcement, we are outlining a comprehensive set of actions to rebuild the company for long-term, sustainable profitability,'' Henry Schacht, Lucent's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. ``We are moving swiftly to implement these actions companywide. They will serve as the foundation for putting Lucent back on track.''

The Murray Hill-based maker of telecommunications gear said its loss from continuing operations amounted to 30 cents a share in the quarter ending Dec. 31. That fell below even the dismal expectations of analysts surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial, who had forecast a loss of 27 cents per share.

In the year-ago quarter, Lucent had net income from continuing operations of $1.08 billion, or 33 cents per share.

Revenues fell 26 percent to $5.84 billion from $7.9 billion a year earlier.

As expected, Lucent announced a wide-ranging restructuring plan intended to reduce costs by more than $2 billion and improve working capital by about the same amount.

It plans a restructuring charge of $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion for write-offs of inventory, facility consolidations and other changes. Lucent net income from continuing operations for all of fiscal 2000 was $1.68 billion.

The restructuring program announced Wednesday excludes Lucent's Agere microelectronics unit, which the company plans to spin off this year. The unit has about 16,000 employees.

Lucent sells high-speed telecommunications equipment and services to long distance and regional telephone companies, wireless and Internet service providers, and competitive local exchange carriers.

The company's once-dominant market position, as well as its credibility with analysts, has fallen sharply as it misjudged market trends and lost business due to production and other problems. Those troubles date back to late 1999, when Lucent first shocked analysts by warning it would miss its earnings target.

That became a trend throughout 2000, when the company announced a series of restructurings and, after announcing its fourth-quarter earnings, twice had to revise those figures downward. Meanwhile, the company's stock, once the most widely held stock in the country, plunged about 80 percent in value from its high in December 1999.

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On the Net:

Lucent site: http://www.lucent.com