Paul Donovan
Alcatel in £1.8bn restructuring as Lucent talks
fail
All the papers continue with the ongoing saga of
French telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel and US technology
company Lucent, after their plans for a merger fell apart. The
Daily Telegraph reports a profit warning from Alcatel amid "a
massive restructuring bill". The Times believes the profit warning
makes the company a ripe target for a takeover bid. Meanwhile the
Financial Times reports that Lucent is considering finance raising
options together with the sale of its optical fibre division.
Murdoch and Packer "misled" over One.Tel
The Financial
Times, Times and Independent report that junior media moguls
Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer claim to have been "profoundly
misled" over the state of Australian telecommunications company
One.Tel, which went into administration yesterday. The Times
reports that the sons of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer are set to
take legal action, though against whom is not clear. Murdoch's News
International and Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting have
invested £330m in One.Tel.
Police to flood stolen mobiles with messages
The Daily
Telegraph, Times and Guardian report police plans to flood stolen
mobile phones with text messages, thereby rendering them useless.
The plan, known as "phone bombing", involves sending text messages
every few minutes saying that the phone has been stolen and should
not be bought or sold.
Sun's warning reverberates through technology
sector
The Independent and Financial Times both follow up
on the reverberations from Sun Microsystems' fourth-quarter sales
warning. The Independent believes that the news could have dire
implications for Sun Microsystems resellers such as Computacenter
and Morse. The paper says that Computacenter will issue a profits
alert next month, while trading in Morse shares was choppy
yesterday. The Financial Times takes the Sun Microsystems' news as
a jumping-off point to suggest that Oracle could be the next big US
technology company to issue a profit warning for the current
quarter.
Best of the rest
The Financial Times reports:
- The Japanese government is considering loosening immigration
restrictions to alleviate a shortage of IT engineers.
The Times reports:
- Thus, the national telecoms group, has signed a deal with Apple
whereby Demon will become the default Internet access service
available on every Apple computer sold in the UK.