Nortel Networks

Nortel Networks Corporation

File:Nortel.svg
Company type	Public TSX: NT NYSE: NT
Industry	Telecommunications, Networking
Founded	Montreal, Quebec (1895)
Headquarters	Toronto, Ontario , Canada
Key people	Mike Zafirovski, Vice Chairman, CEO & COO CTO: John Roese
Products	See [1]
Revenue	$11.42 billion USD
Number of employees	32,000 (2006)
Website	www.nortel.com

File:Nortelbcm.jpg

Nortel BCM 200 coupled with an IP phone

Nortel Networks Corporation TSX: NT NYSE: NT, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now known simply as Nortel, is a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

History

In 1895, Bell Telephone Company of Canada decided to spin off its manufacturing arm to build phones for sale to other companies as well as other devices such as fire alarm boxes and street call boxes for police and fire departments. This company was incorporated as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Limited. In 1900, the new company began manufacturing the first wind-up gramophones that played flat discs. In 1913, the company's headquarters and main factory was built in Montreal. In 1914, the company merged with Imperial Cable to form Northern Electric, co-owned by Bell Canada and the U.S. company Western Electric. By the end of World War I, Northern Electric had become a major distributor of Western Electric appliances across Canada.

1950 Logo

In 1922, Northern Electric started manufacturing radios. In 1928, it produced the first talking movie sound system in the British Empire for a theatre in Montreal. In 1949, an antitrust suit in the U.S. forced AT&T/Western Electric to sell its stake in Northern Electric to Bell Canada. Deprived of its Western Electric tie, Northern began developing its own products. In 1953, Northern Electric produced its first television sets using tubes made by RCA. Bell Canada acquired 100 percent of Northern Electric in 1964; through public stock offerings starting in 1973, Bell's ownership of Northern Electric and its successors would be reduced, though it continued to have majority control.

In 1966, the Northern Electric research lab, Northern Electric Laboratories (the predecessor to Bell-Northern Research), started looking into the possibilities of fiber optic cable, and in 1969, began work on digitizing telephone communications. Also in 1969, Northern began making inroads into the U.S. market with its switching systems. In 1972, it opened its first factory in the U.S. in Michigan. In 1975, Northern began shipping its first digital switching systems, one of the earliest such systems to be sold.

Old Northern Telecom (Nortel) logo

Old Northern Telecom (Nortel) logo

In 1976, the company name was changed to Northern Telecom Limited, and management announced its intention to concentrate the company's efforts on digital technology.

In 1983, due to deregulation, Bell Canada Enterprises (later shortened to BCE) was formed as the parent company to Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. Bell-Northern Research was jointly owned 50-50 by Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. The combined three companies were referred to by employees as the tricorporate.

As Nortel, the streamlined identity it adopted for its 100-year anniversary in 1995, the company set out to dominate the burgeoning global market for public and private networks.

In 1998, with the acquisition of Bay Networks, the company's name was changed to Nortel Networks to emphasize its ability to provide complete solutions for multiprotocol, multiservice, global networking over the Internet and other communications networks. As a consequence of the stock transaction used to purchase Bay Networks, BCE ceased to be the majority shareholder of Nortel. In 2000, BCE spun-out Nortel, distributing its holdings of Nortel to its shareholders. Bell-Northern Research was gradually absorbed into Nortel, as it first acquired a majority share in BNR, and eventually acquired the entire company.

In the late 1990s, stock market speculators, hoping that Nortel would reap increasingly lucrative profits from the sale of fibre optic network gear, began pushing up the price of the company's shares to unheard-of levels despite the company's repeated failure to turn a profit. Under the leadership of CEO John Roth, sales of optical equipment had been robust in the late 1990s, but the market was soon saturated. When the speculative telecom bubble of the late 1990s reached its pinnacle, Nortel was to become one of the most spectacular casualties.

At its height, Nortel accounted for more than a third of the total valuation of all the companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), Canada's largest. Nortel's market capitalization fell from C$398 billion in September 2000 to less than $5 billion in August 2002. Nortel's stock price plunged from C$124 to $0.47. When Nortel's stock crashed, it took with it a wide swath of Canadian investors and pension funds, and left 60,000 Nortel employees unemployed. CEO John Roth retired under controversy to be succeeded by former CFO Frank Dunn. Despite some initial perceived success in turning the company around, he was fired for cause in 2004 after being accused of financial mismanagement. Dunn and other former Nortel Officers, have been accused of engaging in accounting fraud by the SEC. Bill Owens then took over as the CEO, and was most recently succeeded by Mike S. Zafirovski.

In late 2004, Nortel returned to using the Nortel name alone for branding purposes, although the company's name remains Nortel Networks.

Corporate information

Business structure

As of September 2006, Nortel employs approximately 33,000 people worldwide. Nortel operations are divided into the following segments:

• Carrier Networks: Mobility networking solutions, including CDMA, GSM, and UMTS, and carrier networking solutions, both circuit and packet based.
• Enterprise Solutions (ES): Enterprise networking solutions, including circuit and packet based voice, data, security, multimedia messaging and conferencing, and call centers.
• Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN): Optical and metropolitan area networking solutions, for carrier and enterprise customers.
• Global Services (GS): Services in four areas: network implementation, network support, network management, and network applications (including web services).

Headquarters

As of October 25, 2005, the company relocated headquarters from Brampton, Ontario in the Greater Toronto Area to 195 The West Mall in the neighbourhood of Etobicoke in Toronto. The Brampton offices were sold to media-telecom giant Rogers Communications for C$100 million. The company has other key locations across Canada including its R&D headquarters in Ottawa.

Global worksites, partners, and customers

The company expanded into the U.S. in 1971. Today there are employees in over 100 locations in the U.S. with R&D, software engineering, and sales centers in many states including California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Nortel's primary R&D centres are in Ottawa, Research Triangle Park (North Carolina), Richardson (Texas), Boston (Massachusetts), Santa Clara (California) and Montreal.

Nortel has significant presence in Europe, Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Nortel delivers network infrastructure and communication services to customers in 17 countries across Asia including the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey. In addition, the company has 3 joint ventures in the People's Republic of China.

Products and customers

Nortel Networks is a long established industry leader in delivering end-to-end carrier grade telecommunications network infrastructure and solutions. The company has decades of experience in delivering robust, fault tolerant, software architectures and the know-how to scale to millions of users and manage thousands of network elements. Nortel Networks has deep and broad experience spanning the key areas in telecommunications – optical transmission, wireless, voice, multimedia, and packet networking and associated services.

Nortel's service provider customers include some of the world's largest public network carriers, including wireline, wireless, and cable operators. Enterprise customers include small, medium, and large businesses and institutions, and span multiple sectors, including financial services, health care, education, retail, and Government. Nortel serves 9 out of 10 North American Fortune 500 companies, and worldwide, their installed base of products represents more than 50 million enterprise users.

Nortel has long been a main equipment supplier to Bell Canada, a role similar to Western Electric in the United States. A key product in the 1980s and 1990s was the DMS family (Digital Multiplex System) of switches. These switches replaced the old electro-mechanical and stored program control switches used in local phone networks and to build and expand long distance networks. The DMS family has evolved into the Succession platform which brings Voice over IP technology to the switch platform.

Key products for the Enterprise market include the Meridian 1 PBX and the Norstar key system. The Meridian 1 is aimed at large to medium-sized businesses. The Norstar key system is aimed at small business and branch offices and provides many of the same features as the Meridan 1 PBX.

Corporate governance

Current members of the board of directors of Nortel Networks:

• Harry Jonathan Pearce, Chairman of the Board
• Jalynn H. Bennett, CM
• Dr. Manfred Bischoff
• Hon. James B. Hunt, Jr.
• Hon. John P. Manley
• John Alan MacNaughton
• Richard David McCormick
• Ronald Walter Osborne
• Mike Zafirovski

Former members of the board of directors of the company include:

• Robert Ellis Brown
• John Cleghorn
• Robert Alexander Ingram
• James Blanchard
• Yves Fortier
• Guylaine Saucier
• Sherwood Smith
• Lynton "Red" Wilson, former Chairman of the Board

Company Financials

2007

As part of its corporate renewal process, its Board of Directors selected KPMG as the Company's independent auditor commencing with fiscal year 2007.

2006

Nortel’s latest financials were announced November 6, 2006, reporting its third quarter results and showing 17% growth for the quarter over the same period last year. Nortel reported a net loss in the third quarter of $99 million, compared to a net loss of $136 million in the third quarter of 2005, and net earnings of $366 million in the second quarter of 2006.

2005

In March 2005, Nortel's recovery took a downturn when they posted a significant loss for the quarter.

In its report, filed March 18, 2005, Nortel reported a third-quarter loss of $259 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a restated third-quarter 2003 profit of $131 million, or 3 cents a share.

On August 17, 2005, LG Electronics and Nortel signed a definitive agreement to form a joint venture that will offer telecom and networking solutions in the wireline, optical, wireless and enterprise areas for South Korean and global customers. Nortel will own 50 percent plus one share in the joint venture.

Nortel reported $10.52 billion in revenue for 2005, compared to $9.52 billion in 2004.

2004

Nortel shares soared in the late 1990s and collapsed in 2002 along with the technology bubble. Nortel then reported a return to profitability in early 2003, following a promise to do so by former Chief Executive Frank Dunn.

In late October 2003, Nortel announced that it intended to restate approximately $900M of liabilities carried on its previously reported balance sheet as of June 30, 2003, following a comprehensive internal review of these liabilities (“First Restatement”). The Company stated that the principal effects of the restatement would be a reduction in previously reported net losses for 2000, 2001, and 2002 and an increase in shareholders’ equity and net assets previously reported on its balance sheet.

Nortel unveiled details of additional accounting errors involving billions of dollars and said that a dozen (12) of the company's most senior executives would take the unusual step of returning $8.6 million, millions of dollars of bonuses they were paid based on the erroneous accounting.

At Nortel, investigators ultimately found about $3 billion in revenue had been booked improperly in 1998, 1999, and 2000. More than $2 billion was moved into later years, about $750 million was pushed forward beyond 2003, and about $250 million was wiped away completely.

Five directors stepped down. Nortel's board has faced criticism for allowing the company's accounting fiasco to go on and approving the bonus plans, but none of the five directors were accused of wrongdoing in a company investigation.

This accounting controversy eventually led to the departure of ten Nortel executives in 2004.

Nortel filed with regulators its financial statements for 2003 and restated, for the second time, its results from earlier years. Securities regulators, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the U.S. Attorney's office were conducting probes during this same period.

See also

• Bell-Northern Research

• Multiservice Switch
• Passport Carrier Release

External links

• Nortel – Company website.
• People at Nortel Networks (LinkedIn)
• Nortel News – Corporate news from Nortel.
• Nortel background article by the CBC
• Southwest Florida Partner Company

References

• Nortel Networks, Larry Macdonald, John Wiley & Sons, 2000. ISBN 0-471-64542-7
• "Northern Electric - A Brief History". Retrieved 2006-09-12.