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Technology Stocks : Alcatel (ALA) and France -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bertrand bidaud who wrote (238)	11/23/1998 10:11:00 AM
From: Steve Fancy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3891

(UPDATE) Alcatel Gets $120 Million Telecom-Systems Pact From Infostrada Dow Jones Online News, Monday, November 23, 1998 at 08:26 PARIS -(Dow Jones)- French telecommunications and electronics group Alcatel SA Monday said it received a three-year contract worth 680 million francs ($120 million) to provide Italy's fixed-telephone-line operator Infostrada with a transmission system, network equipment and fiber optics. Infostrada, a joint venture between Italy's Olivetti SpA and Germany's Mannesmann AG group, holds a license from the Italian government to provide fixed-line telecommunications. Alcatel (ALA) continues to be under a cloud after it surprised shareholders with a profit warning after reporting poor first-half results Sept. 17. The shares fell 38% on the Paris stock market that day. The company had said its 1998 operating profit would fall about 1.5 billion francs short of estimates because of canceled equipment orders from big telephone operators and a deepening of the Asian and Russian economic crises. Alcatel and other equipment makers must face up to a more fundamental problem: The big, incumbent phone operators are cutting back or delaying infrastructure investments in the face of growing competition at home and uncertainty in Asian and Russian markets. The company was hit particularly hard by canceled orders from Deutsche Telekom AG. The German giant has deferred investing in certain "local access" infrastructure because it is currently forced by regulators to lease that portion of its network to rivals at low cost. Alcatel, France's once-struggling trains-to-telecommunications conglomerate, has been trying to reinvent itself as a high-tech company. It sold off loads of businesses and is expanding its satellite operations. The company recently purchased Texas-based telecom-equipment firm DSC Communications Corp. for about $4.4 billion in stock. Copyright (c) 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.