From today's The Wall Street Urinal:
Dow Jones Newswires -- February 4, 1999
Interview: Lucent Exec Sees Big Asia Revenue Growth
By James Paradise
TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Revenues of the microelectronics group of Lucent Technologies Inc. (LU) of
the U.S. will grow between 20% and 25% in the Asia-Pacific region in the current fiscal year and
may grow around the same rate next year, a Lucent official said Thursday.
Growth this business year, which ends Sept. 30, is coming from wireless handsets, circuits used in
hard disk drives, modems for personal computers, telecommunications circuits used in switches and
optoelectronics products such as lasers, said Glen Riley, region president for Asia-Pacific for the
microelectronics group of Lucent Technologies, in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.
The microelectronics group is an operating group within Lucent Technologies which in the last fiscal
year has accounted for about 10% of the company's $30 billion in overall revenues. In that year,
Asia-Pacific revenues of the microelectronics group rose roughly 5% from the previous year, and
worldwide revenues from the group were 12% higher, Riley said.
In the Asia-Pacific region this year, the microelectronics group is enjoying strong growth in China,
Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, Riley said. The slowest growth is probably in Japan, he said.
The strategy of Lucent Technologies, a company set up a few years ago as a spinoff from AT&T, is
to focus on the communications segment, he said, which has large growth potential.
"It took about a century to install the world's first 700 million phone lines; an additional 700 million
lines will be deployed over the next 15 (years to) 20 years," he said later at a symposium organized
by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International, a global industry association.
"There are more than 200 million wireless subscribers in the world today; an additional 700 million
more will be added over the next 15 (years to) 20 years," he also said.
One part of the microelectronics group's strategy is to provide complete "systems-on-a-chip," or
semiconductors that combine logic and memory functions on a single chip. The company doesn't
participate in the dynamic random access memory chip or standard microprocessor businesses, he
said.
Riley didn't make any profit forecasts.
-By James Paradise, 813-5255-2947, jparadise@ap.org |
