Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Nortel Announces More Cuts

The 3rd quarter results for Nortel came out a day ago, a new corporate model was announced where three business units will be set up, but1300 more jobs will be cut.

Nortel will also be looking at their Real Estate holdings to see whether there is money in those areas that might help the company survive. A freeze on salaries was announced, as well as a hiring freeze, which seems an obvious move. I have seen a few experts question whether this means a freeze on Executive compensation packages as well? John Chambers has taken a salary of $1 in tough times at Cisco, will Nortel leadership do the same?

Soon to be Extinct?

Is Nortel a Dinosaur?

It does seem to be that maybe the problem with Nortel is not necessarily only it’s business models, but maybe it’s markets are starting to dry up.

Their cash cow for the past few years, the CDMA Wireless business is starting to dry up for revenue, and now with Bell Canada and Telus announcing a shift by announcing an “overlay” GSM/UMTS (HSPA) network (shutting Nortel out of the contract), that may well be another sign of the coming extinction of this former Telecomm giant.

The splitting of the company into three distinct business units allow for quick and easy:

• Sale of the division, if needed to raise cash
• Shut down of the division if the business is unable to compete.

Time will tell if Nortel can turn itself around, I hope it does, because it has some amazing people still working there.

New Housing Price Increase Slows

Across the country new house prices have increased by 2.1% year over year. In Ottawa year over year the new house prices are up 4.3% which is interesting to me, however, Edmonton seems to be having price drops of over 5% year over year as well. Depends on where you live, but buying a new home is still increasing (but slower than before).

Carnivals

More posts were mentioned in Carnivals

• On a Quest To Be Debt Free hosted the Festival of Frugality: Veteran’s Day Edition where my article on Case Study: iPhone from Fido vs. iPod Touch and a Cell Phone