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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Hunt who wrote (8389)	6/29/1999 5:12:00 PM
From: Mark Palmberg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

sounds like LU lost Yeah, Bill, but wasn't this something like a $5B contract, total? I'll take a $1B loser's fee any day! ;) Mark

To: William Hunt who wrote (8389)	6/29/1999 5:24:00 PM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

Bill, 5 vendors won, but perhaps not evenly. LU may have taken a very small piece or a very large piece (my bet). ASND products (in testing since January) in addition to the traditional LU gear. Brian

To: William Hunt who wrote (8389)	6/29/1999 5:28:00 PM
From: Mr.Fun	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21876

Well, it is by no means certain that 5 winners means each will get a fifth. Lucent is pretty confident it will get alot more than 20% of this business before all is said and done. I tend to agree for the following reasons: 1. Lucent has performed very well on the previous contract, completing deployment more than a year ahead of schedule - All of the complaints happened early, under AT&T's watch. 2. Lucent can beat every one of these competitors on delivery lead times, a key consideration for the Saudi's who want nearly a million lines delivered ASAP. 3. Lucent and Ericsson are the only vendors able to support both wireless and wireline on the same switch platform, a key consideration for this contract. 4. Lucent has thousands of trained installers and maintentnace personel in country today, again giving them an extraordinary advantage in bringing up systems quickly. 5. That said, it probably does make sense to award to multiple equipment providers as: A. even LU wouldn't be able to ramp to deliver a million lines on its own as rapidly as the Saudi's want, B. International politics demands participation by others, C. incompatibilies in phone equipment are highly unlikely, nearly every major telco worldwide has multiple switch vendors. I expect Lucent to have taken away as much as 50% of the total when everything is settled.

To: William Hunt who wrote (8389)	6/30/1999 11:50:00 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 21876

Saudi deal: Foreign firms still await word on Saudi phone deal 10:05 a.m. Jun 29, 1999 Eastern MANAMA, June 29 (Reuters) - International firms competing for a multi-billion dollar Saudi telecommunications project said on Tuesday they had not been told when it may be awarded and one source said a decision was not expected before mid-2000. Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson and Northern Telecom have been competing for the $5-6 billion project, known as TEP-8, to add some two million telephone lines to the kingdom's overloaded network. ''It (the project) is not expected to be awarded very soon. Probably not before the first half of next year,'' a Riyadh-based industry source closely following the project told Reuters. ''That is because they (the Saudi Telecommunications Company) are very busy with what they are doing now which will be completed in the middle of 2000, and that is the time when they will be able to organise new deals,'' the source said. Officials at the Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC), set up in 1998 with an initial capital of 10 billion riyals ($2.6 billion) as part of the desert kingdom's privatisation drive, could not be immediately reached for comment. The STC is aiming to almost treble Saudi's 2.4 million telephone lines. It had initially asked international firms to submit their offer for the project, known as TEP-8, by November 30 of last year. But in January this year it extended the deadline to February, 1999. Demand for telephone lines for the 18 million population in Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer and exporter, is growing rapidly. And the introduction of the Internet earlier this year has added more pressure on the network. One industry source suggested that the STC was likely to break up the project and distribute it among the five companies. ''Each company will do part of the job,'' he said. He added that the STC would award the project to companies rather than giving it to contractors. Industry sources dismissed the idea that financial problems were causing the delay in executing the project.