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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: H James Morris who wrote (53260)	6/27/2002 6:26:51 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Telecom sector will be cut down to a smaller size By Ben Klayman CHICAGO, June 27 (Reuters) - The global telecommunications industry has been knocked low in the eyes of investors and even lower in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off. But it remains to be seen if the sector has been cut down to size. Job cuts at No. 2 U.S. long distance telephone company WorldCom Inc. (Nasdaq:WCOME - News), the world's second largest cell-phone maker Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - News) and other telecom companies are just the beginning of another round of slashing in an already battered industry, analysts said on Thursday. "The bottom line is we haven't seen the bottom. It's the worst time in telecoms history," independent telecom analyst Jeff Kagan said. "Fortunately, telecom is like oxygen. We need it so it's going to survive and it's going to recover, but this is just unprecedented." "The telecom world order will look much different in five years," he added, explaining more consolidation is inevitable. The telecommunications industry cut almost 318,000 jobs last year and has announced the elimination of an additional 135,000 positions through May this year, both leading totals for all industries in those periods, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 'STRUGGLING WITH THE BUBBLE' Any hoped-for rebound has been delayed repeatedly as spending at such carriers as Sprint Corp. (NYSE:FON - News) and Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE:Q - News) has further slumped, forcing more job cuts. "I don't think that it's finished," Jane Zweig, CEO of wireless consulting firm, the Shosteck Group, of the job cuts. "It's an industry struggling with the bubble." WorldCom and Motorola's job cuts were just the latest blows, following closely on the heels of new cuts or warnings from such smaller players as Tellium Inc. (NasdaqNM:TELM - News), Sycamore Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:SCMR - News) and Ciena Corp. (NasdaqNM:CIEN - News). Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ - News), the No. 1 U.S. local phone carrier, also said earlier this year it would cut the equivalent of 10,000 jobs through layoffs, reduction in overtime and eliminating contract workers. It has not provided an update on how many of those have been eliminated. WorldCom faces fraud charges over improper booking of nearly $4 billion in costs and false reports of profits over the past five quarters. The Clinton, Mississippi-based company late Tuesday fired its chief financial officer and said it would cut 17,000 jobs, or more than 20 percent of its work force, and slash its capital spending budget by 40 percent to $2.1 billion. Motorola said Thursday it would cut another 7,000 jobs, or 7 percent below its previous year-end target of 100,000 employees, and take charges totaling about $3.5 billion to essentially complete its restructuring. Chairman and Chief Executive Christopher Galvin said the Chicago area-based company was taking itself back to its 1995 size, before the excesses of the telecom and dot-com booms. "The investment era of the late 1990s won't repeat itself perhaps in our working lifetimes because so many of the highly touted business models probably didn't exist to begin with," he told analysts on a conference call. Tellium, which makes optical switches for telephone carriers, said this week it would slash 200 jobs, or more than one-third of its workers, while last week Sycamore, another telecom equipment maker, said it would slash 235 jobs, or one-third of its work force. Minneapolis-based ADC Telecommunications Inc. (NasdaqNM:ADCT - News) said in May it expects to return to profitability by cutting more jobs and reducing factory costs further. Ciena's warned last week its fiscal third-quarter revenues could be "down meaningfully," leading some analysts to predict more job cuts at the telecom equipment firm. However, Ciena is not expected to be alone. Numerous analysts expect telecom equipment giant Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LU - News), which has said it plans to reduce its work force below 50,000, will actually need to cut closer to Canadian rival Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE:NT - News; Toronto:NT.TO - News), which has targeted 42,000. A Lucent spokesman said the company remains on track to reach the 50,000 figure by the end of September, but it will respond to market conditions as necessary. Other telecom companies expected to ax more workers in response to the weak environment include Citizens Communications Co. (NYSE:CZN - News), and telecom equipment makers Alcatel (Paris:CGEP.PA - News; NYSE:ALA - News) of France, Sweden's Ericsson (NasdaqNM:ERICY - News; Stockholm:ERICb.ST - News), Tellabs Inc. (NasdaqNM:TLAB - News) and Juniper Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:JNPR - News) Alcatel warned on Wednesday it was headed for an operating loss this year, and analysts said it could axe another 10,000 jobs, or 12 percent of its work force. (Additional reporting by Yukari Iwatani in Chicago) __________________________________ btw, thanks for the link to the info. on the TC2000 software.

To: H James Morris who wrote (53260)	6/27/2002 6:35:12 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Tracking the Nano Evolution larta.org June 24, 2002 Not only is nanotechnology not a real market, it's not even a real industry or science community. This appears to clash with the recent National Science Foundation proclamation that "nanotechnology has a projected total worldwide market size of over $1 trillion dollars annually in 10 to 15 years." This viewpoint is echoed not just from investors with cold feet or skeptical analysts, but from technologists whose work and research is focused on science at the nano-scale. Such a perspective is not borne out of a reluctance to validate nanotechnology, but is on the contrary, a testament to its vast range of possibility and application, which they say is both too broad and too nascent to be categorized. "Yes, I'm reluctant to define it as an industry, and as a community," says Mike James of Rockwell Scientific, which has invested significant funding towards nanotech-related research and development, most recently in the area of nano magnetic particles. James will be speaking at next month's Nano Republic Conference at UCLA, which will bring together primarily California-based technologists, academics, and investors. James' background is in the materials field, which is one of the few nano applications that already has an industry track record, years before the term nano became the current hot high tech topic. No matter what market outcomes it produces in the near or long term, nanoscience will never be an industry unto itself, but a science of many avenues of application and possibility that could redefine the direction of several industries. "I think the framework for this is to recognize that nanotechnology is a technology or set of technologies, and not a market. It's a set of technical breakthroughs that will seep into many different markets," says Arati Prabhakar, the former director of the NIST program who is now a venture capitalist with U.S. Venture Partners. "I think somewhat to the detriment of the field, you're seeing a lot of science fiction speculation about what's possible, and the great things that can be done, hype about the next big thing in terms of venture investing. That really creates a lot of noise because at the end of the day what you really get to is that nano is set of very amazing technologies. It's a very fertile research area, but it's not a particularly fertile area for venture investment. It's still very, very early stage, and there will be a few opportunities, but not many, in the next few years." The attention has been extraordinary in nano recently, and despite the myriad of hype and hype artists, much of this is rooted in justifiable excitement for what technologists can do to harness nano for a variety of applications. Yet despite this, investor interest has been carefully plotted, largely due of course to the significant decrease in high tech venture investing in general. Rockwell Scientific, as well as other major research labs, have also been careful to invest R&D only towards nano applications that have near term market potential. What is the most important about the recent plethora of media introductions, reports, and publications is the attention it brings to the work that is being done in nano, not because of its ability to sway skeptical investors. "Whenever you have these leapfrog technologies, there's no detailed roadmap to outline the future so there's a lot of analysis that has to go into the investments," James says. "I believe that the VC community is smart enough to sift through all the fluff, and I think that's why you're not seeing a great deal of investment at this point in time because the payoff is a great deal of years out." Despite this careful approach amongst investors, the public and private money flowing towards nano has not been insignificant. A recent study published by the research firm In Realis found that $42 million of private investment has gone towards nanotech-related ventures in the first quarter of 2002 alone. Also, U.S. government spending towards R&D, although significantly behind from other countries, saw an ascent in 2001 to $495 million. Yet because nanotechnology is so dissipated, and often hidden under other umbrellas such as bioscience or electronics, treal numbers of total private nano investment flow have yet to be determined. Yet these figures do provide a strong argument that a rise in dollar commitment has been somewhat parallel to the rise of attention in nano. But despite the generally sober approach, nano investment, as well as nano attention, will likely see a sobering as real market outcomes become more clear. "The hype for this whole area is going to be over in about 3-5 years," says Joe Lichtenhan of Hybrid Plastics, another speaker at the upcoming Nano Republic Conference. "I just think that within three to five years the market leaders for nanotechnology will be very apparent. And there will be a portfolio of nanotechnology companies for the public to invest in. Once the public market has appeared, and the clear market leaders are identified, there may be some valuation readjustment. It will follow a similar trend to when the dot com companies went down, except with more standing companies. And by then the public's attention will have turned to something else." by Wendy Hall Larta Staff Writer