X
Home & Office

Alcatel-Lucent grows Aussie business

Calendar year 2008 was a good one for Alcatel-Lucent: the company's Australian revenues grew $43 million to reach a total of $861 million.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Calendar year 2008 was a good one for Alcatel-Lucent: the company's Australian revenues grew $43 million to reach a total of $861 million.

According to the telecommunications supply company's financial statement, which it lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on 30 June, its consolidated revenue grew over the year to 31 December 2008 by around 5 per cent, netting it a total of $861 million in revenues, up from last year's figure of $817 million. The documents were signed by the company's managing director Andrew Butterworth, who was appointed earlier this year.

Alcatel-Lucent attributed the growth to two projects, Sunrise and PLV, and its inclusion of Lucent Technology's sales revenue within its annual figures. Despite the positive result, spokespeople were unable to comment. It is not known what the two projects directly refer to, although in June 2008 Alcatel-Lucent inked an outsourcing deal with Swiss telco Sunrise. PLV is believed to be an internal network transformation project at Telecom New Zealand.

Despite the company's revenue growth, its bottom line took a hit, falling from last year's high of $44.7 million to $10.2 million this year, which it partly attributed in its balance sheet to $8.3 million in restructuring costs and a $9 million impairment of goodwill. The company also reported doubling its marketing expenditure from $29 million to $59 million this year.

Alcatel-Lucent earlier this year faced a potentially disastrous situation after Telstra was ousted from the Federal Government's original $4.7 billion National Broadband Network proposal. The company had appeared to be relying on Telstra's role in the NBN to give it a spot in the fibre-to-the-home roll out.

However, the company, along with rivals such as Cisco, face an enhanced prospect of Australian sales in the coming next few years due to the Federal Government's decision to spend up to $43 billion on a much larger NBN. The NBN company has not yet gone to market for technology suppliers, apart from a small optical fibre tender limited to Tasmania.

Editorial standards