Alcatel-Lucent Ousts CEO — Too Little Too Late

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Deeply damaged telecom equipment company Alcatel-Lucent S.A. (NYSE: ALU) has fired CEO Ben Verwaayen. The decision will not matter. The company has lost so much market share that its shares trade near penny stock levels.

The efforts at a turnaround have failed for years. In the spring of 2008, the stock hit $7.50. It currently trades barely above $1. Alcatel-Lucent has lost money in each of the past three years, on revenue that has been flat at about $21 billion. The successes of Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) have made growth at Alcatel-Lucent almost impossible.

The company announced:

Alcatel-Lucent (announced today that CEO, Ben Verwaayen, has decided not to seek re-election as a director at this year’s Annual General Meeting, and will step down as CEO once a successful transition has been executed.

Philippe Camus, Chairman of the Alcatel-Lucent Board, said “After due reflection, the Board has accepted Ben’s decision to step down as CEO.”

“Over the last few years, Ben has set a new direction, created one company out of two, and has recently seen through the completion of the stabilisation of the company’s balance sheet, enabling us to move forward with confidence.”

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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