Nortel Networks ups layoff tally to 4,000
<HTML>From Bert Hill and Vito Pilieci
"The Ottawa Citizen"
Nortel Networks will slash 4,000 jobs this year, including 830 in Ottawa, after aggressively adding more than 11,000 jobs in 2000.
The telecommunications giant said yesterday the cuts will be balanced by creating 4,000 new jobs in high-growth product development centres.
Ottawa, which now supports 17,000 jobs, is expected to at least hold its own.
Nortel stock rose $3.40 or seven per cent to $51.10 in heavy trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Nortel insisted the cuts are not designed to reduce operating costs in the face of growing prospects of a slower pace of growth in the telecommunication industry this year.
Competitors such as Lucent Technologies and ADC Communications have announced major job cuts. And even mighty Cisco Systems, the king of Internet equipment, has acknowledged business is slowing.
Nortel belatedly made the disclosure under intense pressure triggered by leaks and reports that cuts as deep as 5,000 to 10,000 jobs are in the works.
It will cut 170 jobs in Toronto and across Canada.
The balance of the 4,000 job cuts will be in the U.S. and abroad.
David Powers, analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis, said the announcement "certainly looks suspicious in light of the overall sales slowdown that we have seen in communications equipment.
"Reading the tea leaves and saying that growth is slowing, it makes sense to (make cuts) beforehand versus waiting until things get tough."
Nortel will release its latest results next Thursday. Chief executive John Roth has reaffirmed predictions that sales in the quarter ending Dec. 31 will reach between $8.5 billion U.S. to $8.8 billion U.S.
For 2001, Nortel expects to outsell competitors in a communications market that will grow by more than 20 per cent.
The job cuts are the biggest at Nortel since 1998 when 8,000 jobs were eliminated, primarily through selling manufacturing operations to contractors.
The cuts will affect 4.2 per cent of Nortel's 94,500 employees around the world. About 25 per cent are in Canada and 35 per cent in the U.S.
Despite last year's hiring boom in the optical and wireless sectors, Nortel continued to selectively cut staff by contracting out specialized functions and weeding out employees who did not meet performance targets.
Chief operating officer Clarence Chandran said Nortel will continue to hire in the high-growth optical and wireless Internet applications and electronic businesses.
It will also "streamline" older, slower-growth parts of the business like traditional voice circuit gear.
Mark Lucey, an analyst with TD Newcrest, said Nortel could be trying to avoid a repeat of a 1998 problem when it surprised the market with lower-than-expected growth.
Still, he said Nortel should quickly revise aggressive growth projections for 2001 as soon as possible.
"I am hoping that the company will come out with a more realistic assessment of their outlook which I think is (still) healthy." </HTML>