PARIS (AP) Wearing black trash bags marked with crosses, more than a thousand Alcatel-Lucent workers marched to the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday, staging a mock funeral that the chief executive warned could easily become a reality for a company with its roots in the earliest days of the telephone.
The employees were protesting Alcatel-Lucent's plans to cut 10,000 jobs around the world and save 1 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in costs. Like many former pioneers of the communications industry, Alcatel-Lucent is having a hard time adapting to seismic technological shifts.
"This company could disappear," CEO Michel Combes told Europe 1 radio on Tuesday ahead of the protest that ended at Alcatel-Lucent headquarters near Paris' most famous monument. "This company hasn't made money since 2006."
Combes blamed bad decision-making since the 2006 merger of France's Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent Technologies, such as abandoning high-growth countries, a lack of innovation and a failure to make the leap to new cell technology, such as 3G.
Jeff Kagan, an analyst who follows Alcatel-Lucent from the U.S., said the company focused too much on voice technology while the industry was "quickly evolving into a data space" instead.
