Ailing telecoms group Lucent Technologies lost a net $8.8 billion in the July-September quarter. The massive loss, which included an $8 billion restructuring charge and losses from discontinued operations, compared to a net loss of $484 million a year earlier.
Lucent employs over 1,000 in Ireland.
Revenue slumped 28% to $5.2 billion over the same period, the company said in a statement. The July-September period, the fourth quarter in Lucent's business year, produced a fiscal year 2001 net loss of $16.2 billion, compared with a net profit of $1.2 billion a year earlier. Sales in the year fell 26% to $21.294 billion.
'As we said on August 23, the market continues to decline,' Lucent chairman and chief executive Henry Schacht said in a statement. 'Like others in the industry, we now believe the overall market decline in 2002 will be 15-to-20%, and our targeted market will be down 10% or more,' he added.
'We think industry spending in our first fiscal quarter of 2002 will be even lower than these levels due to the increased uncertainty after September 11 and the spending patterns of our large North American customers.'
The company said it had shed 29,000 jobs in the year to September, cutting its work force from 106,000 to 77,000.
Lucent said it was still losing cash but had stemmed the flow. Cash flow had improved from negative $2.2 billion in the October-December 2000 quarter to negative $280 million in the latest July-September 2001 quarter.
'We have executed on our plans and made significant progress in just one year. These results set the stage for achieving profitability and positive cash flow in fiscal year 2002,' Schacht said.
For the next quarter, he said restructuring would improve the bottom line. 'As to the top line, we expect our revenues to decline sequentially,' he said. But revenue would improve in the following three months, he forecast.
'When we put our plan together, we were conservative and took these difficult market conditions into consideration,' Schacht said. 'We still believe that we will be able to meet our goal of returning to profitability and positive cash flow in 2002.'
