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All posts tagged ‘turnaround’

Friday, May 9, 2008

CircuitBuster City Block

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Nortel Reports Better-Than-Expected Annual Layoffs

the_bobs.jpgNortel has sacked so many employees in the past eight years, it’s a wonder there are enough pink slips left in HR to inform those who remain of their termination.

The company’s workforce, which numbered nearly 95,000 in 2000, had been cut to 32,500 by the end of the last quarter. And now it’s to be cut further still. Yesterday, the troubled maker of communications equipment reported an ugly fourth-quarter loss of $844 million and announced plans to cut 2,100 jobs and relocate another 1,000 to “higher growth and lower cost” (read: lower wage) areas like China, Mexico, Turkey and India. This latest round of reductions comes almost on the anniversary of Nortel’s last bloodbath–a reduction that eliminated 2,900 jobs and shifted another 1,000 to those “higher growth/lower cost” areas.

Once a high-tech darling, Nortel has spent the past several years trying to recover from the general downturn in the telecom industry and a massive and debilitating accounting scandal. “We are on a journey to rebuild this company,” goes the now familiar refrain sounded quarterly by Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski on the company’s earnings calls. But these days, it seems even the undaunted Zafirovski is feeling, you know, a bit daunted. “Let me just say up front, we have a ways to go,” Zafirovski said yesterday. “We’re not blind to the skepticism facing us. I’ve never seen a turnaround where you fix a business overnight. … And, frankly, the economy is not helping matters. It’s a challenging environment.”

About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.

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Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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