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back to article Nortel begs for bankruptcy protection

Nortel, plagued for months by rumours of serious financial problems, has filed for bankruptcy protection or Chapter 11. The hundred year old Canadian giant only just escaped the same fate in the last downturn in 2001. It posted a loss of $3.4bn for its third quarter, which is bad, but not nearly as bad as the sodding huge $19. …

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  1. Andus McCoatover
    Paris Hilton

    Flextronics???

    You want "tits-up" comment???

    When I was at Nokia, Oulu, Flextronics built a wonderfully beautiful building, resplendent with logo in an area of Oulu called Rusko. Right next to Nokia, in the obvious expectation of business from Nokia Networks, who promptly moved the manufacturing to China. Now, that's superb planning. MBA's at the fore. Or bonfore.

    AFAIR, they never used it. Sold once completed to some White Van Man outfit called DHL.* I believed the company was owned by a Dutch footballer, but I was confused with "Hertz van Hire"

    Paris, cos I'd like her 'tit's-up'

    *Actually a company called "Scanfil" did a similar thing much earlier, on the opposite side of the road. Went tits-up, too. Made PCB's but we got 'em cheaper from Italy!!

    As an aside, I understand Lordi's (Euro song winner for Finland for the first and last time) film was made in the remains of Scanfil.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    lol

    If you don't have the skills to pay your bills, hurry up and die already and leave the business to the big boys, never even heard of nortel lol :)

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Ding Dong!

    Some years ago Nortel's decision to pull out of the DSL market without warning after leading the dot.com I was working for a merry dance over vendor financing for a year, resulted in us going bust and me losing my job.

    Their products were expensive to start off with and got increasingly extortionate if you wanted them to do anything serious; and when they played inthe data market they would bugger off as soon as the cheque cleared and were cluless about supporting the equipment they sold.

    Frankly, they were a shower of bastards.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Nasty joke

    Reminds me of the nasty Nortel jokes of 2001:

    On July 26, 2000, two Nortel employees got a $1000 bonus from their employer. Jimmy invested the bonus in 7 shares of Nortel at $123 each . Joe used his $1000 to buy 66 cases of beer (1584 bottles of beer) and harvested dividends on a nightly basis.

    A year later the dot.com bust hit Nortel hard and both Jimmy and Joe were laid off. Jimmy sold his 7 Nortel shares for $50 and headed over to Joe to commiserate. They finished the last beer and headed to the beer store to return the empties. Joe pocketed his $158.40 refund and proceeded to a brilliant career as investment counsel. Buy beer, not stock!

    Nortel was seriously delusional back then (exponential growth, anybody? 10%, 20% or 40% of GDP into network infrastructure?). Good to see they kept their talent in one place.

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  5. Gis Bun
    Thumb Down

    Toss the CEO

    What ever CEO & president Mike Zafirowski does seems to screw up companies. Motorola had major problems with him there. Now Nortel. Next?

    BTW, one story said they'll probably sell off chunks of the company.

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  6. John
    Boffin

    leave it to the big boys?

    just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it's not a big player. the sad fact has been that on multi-billion dollar revenues Nortel has hardly ever posted a profit in the last few years.

    plus, Nortel phones had much larger than normal NORTEL logos in West Wing and ER for a while. do pay attention.

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  7. Andy ORourke
    Unhappy

    @ lol

    Dont come much bigger than Nortel in the Telecomms industry, a LARGE portion of the worlds Telco infrastructure is built around Nortel kit. The thing that amazes me is how they cant make massive profits with the massive prices they charge!

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @ leave it to the big boys

    Clearly if you have never heard of Nortel you wouldn't know a big boy if it came up and kicked you in the trousers. They produce some serious carrier grade kit (40Gig Ethernet for example).

    Perhaps you should get back to wiring up your home LAN there big boy?

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    The industry

    Making a profit is difficult, currently it's all about killing the competitors at any cost. Who is the next victim? My money is on Alcatel-Lucent, but what do I know?

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    @ leave it to the big boys

    "They produce some serious carrier grade kit (40Gig Ethernet for example)" and have kit on some serious grade US aircraft carriers.

    AC and black helicopters for obvious reasons...

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  11. Andus McCoatover

    @The industry

    Nokia Siemens Networks is my bet. Pint on it?? Go to Ericsson, when Siemens pulls out of the marriage, which I feel they will within 2 years. Performance? DIRE!!

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  12. raving angry loony

    Pity

    It was a good company, ruined by short-sighted, technically ignorant, and greedy executives who did finally managed to kill it. The fact it took Stern and his followers (Roth, etc.) 15 years to kill of Nortel says a lot about how strong the company really was, once.

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If it were a choice between

    having Nortel and seeing the back of Nokia Netact I know who I'd prefer to loose.

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Wouldn't piss on ...

    ... one of their boxes if it were on fire! Biggest pile of toss ever sold to gullible corps. Long on promise, short on delivery, leaving the incumbent IT teams to hold it all together and clean up the mess left behind by Nortel.

    Anything, anything at all, else would be better than buying Nortel.

    Paris - Like Nortel, looks good but utterly pointless

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