Lucent Posts Net Income Of $387 Million For The Quarter

In a sign of continuing improvement in its business and in the telcom market generally, Lucent Technologies today reported its fourth consecutive quarter of profitability, showing net income of $387 million for the quarter ending June 30. The profit is a jump of more than $300 million over the $68 million of net income for Lucent's second quarter, even though revenue remained stuck at $2.19 billion. The revenue figure does represent about a 12 percent increase from the Lucent's third-quarter 2003 results.

Commenting on the positive results, CEO Patricia Russo cited sales progress in international markets, with contract wins in 20 countries during the quarter. Russo also attributed the healthy sales results to activity in VoIP, mobile high-speed data and broadband access.

Among Lucent contract wins over the past few weeks were deals for wireless, landline and cable TV networks in the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Probably the most significant win was the Verizon Wireless contract announced last week. Worth a minimum of $5 billion, it calls for Lucent to supply network hardware, software and services for the carrier's national voice and data network. The deal keeps Lucent as the carrier's primary infrastructure supplier. With the Lucent products and services, Verizon will continue evolving toward its next-generation voice/video/data network while adding to the coverage and capacity of its current voice network and high-speed, wide-area BroadbandAccess data network based on CDMA2000 1xEV-DO technology.

Verizon's wireline side also awarded Lucent a big contract this week, becoming the first carrier to announce plans to deploy Lucent's LambdaXtreme Transport DWDM core optical networking solution as the carrier expands its services for large commercial and government customers by connecting existing regional networks in the U.S. over an IP backbone. The deployment is expected to reduce Verizon's capital and operating costs.In another U.S. wireless win, Lucent and Novatel announced this week announced a contract with AT&T Wireless to deliver Merlin U520third-generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) Wireless PC Card Modems for the launch of the carrier's 3G UMTS Network. The cards"jointly developed by Lucent and Novatel"became available through retail and business customer channels in Detroit, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle on July 20.

In Europe, Lucent this week reported that it had successfully completed a Voice over DSL (VoDSL) deployment for Dutch carrier KPN. Lucent provided infrastructure and services to enable KPN to expand its VoDSL portfolio to offer a new converged voice and data solution to its small and medium-sized enterprises.

Continuing to make gains in Asia with firms such as China Telecom, Lucent this month announced a contract with Chinese carrier Hubei Unicom for a network optimization using mesh technologies for the firm's optical transmission network in Hubei province. Lucent is supplying its LambdaUnite Multi-Service Switch and its WaveStar ADM16/1 and Navis Optical Management System. The intelligent control plane on the LambdaUnite switch will enable Hubei Unicom to quickly "turn up" its network as new network elements are added and also offer differentiated end-customer services with different levels of protection.

A recent Middle East win for Lucent was a $35 million cable telephony agreement with Israeli firm HOT Telecom. Lucent will provide multi-vendor network integration services for HOT Telecom's Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network.