Sad Story
A few days ago Nortel announce that is pushing forward a plan to spend 45 million dollars (yes you read it right fourty five million) on bonuses for its top 1000 executive. The company described this as incentives to get them stick with the company. Another 3 millions will be use as retention bonuses for the rest (19400 employees across North America).
For the sake of the discussion I have to remind you that not too long ago the company filled for bankruptcy and a few days before this announcement the company announced 2.1 billion dollars in losses for Q4 2008.
It is outrageous the same individuals that where able to bring the company from a stock price over 140US$ to almost nothing, now need bonuses to stay, and not penny cash they need 45 millions to stay. Why a company that is struggling to survive will pay money for some individuals that where able to get it to sign for bankruptcy is beyond my comprehension. Why a company that is not able to make a good product in ages, a company that the only worth are some buildings (and is not a construction company, is telecom they say) would keep some leeches, again I don’t understand.
From my point of view, at this moment Nortel is dead, they should cut this company suffering selling it by pieces. They lost the competition in 2001 when they decided to layoff the people form the wireless division, they lost it again when they decided that optical division has to be layoff and the future is the wireless (yes you read again right, after laying off the good engineers they decided that wireless is good), but mean time one year passed and other companies where number one, two in the wireless market so the wireless didn’t went well, back to optics, but again the technology changed and the products from 2000 where outdated for the market of 2004. Good decisions, bad decisions, it should have been very bad decisions if the company stock went in to the pennies trading.
At this moment the company is almost dead, and instead of using the money that they can get to get the company up and running, they borrow more money to pay the very persons that took the decisions that got the company where it is now. I would have fired them long before, now let them live, and go to the competition, maybe this will be Nortel chance, they will destroy the competition as they destroyed Nortel, and this way maybe, Nortel will be able to rise again.
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