The potential impact on the Australian IT industry from massive job cuts recently announced at Lucent and Nortel on are still unknown, according to the tech giants.
Having revealed weak financial performance for the third-quarter, both IT companies have announced that they will cut thousands of jobs globally. However neither company will give any indication of how those cuts will affect specific regions such as Australia.
Lucent announced Tuesday that it may have to make additional cuts to the 7,000 it predicted it would shed last July. That led to Web reports suggesting total job cuts at Lucent would reach 15,000.
The company quickly denied the reports indicating that its goal was to reduce the size of the company to 45,000 by the end of the calendar year. The company is yet to give an indication if the cuts will impact on its Australian operations.
"It will be done in a balanced way to ensure that we have the product set and the people in place to best serve our customers," said Donough Foloey, vice president of public relations at Lucent Asia-Pacific. "That's all I can say at this time".
Nortel is being even more terse about the matter following revelations it plans to axe 7,000 jobs across its international operations.
News of the cuts at Nortel and Lucent coincided with news that Siemens had announced its intention to cut a further 700 jobs. The cuts would occur in its mobile telecommunications infrastructure business.
A spokesperson for Siemens Australia said the company did not expect the job cuts to have an impact on its Australian and New Zealand operations.
"The advice that was coming out to us was that they'd made a certain number of cuts and that's all out of their German office in a particular area,"
Siemens has shed an estimated 33,000 jobs, or seven percent of its workforce, during the last year.
