Alcatel-Lucent has become the latest major telecoms equipment vendor to issue a revised financial outlook for 2012 due to the difficult macroeconomic environment.
The Paris-headquartered company now expects to issue an operating loss of around €40mn for the second quarter of this year, with revenues above €3.5bn, based on an analysis of its preliminary financial results.
Looking ahead, Alcatel-Lucent expects the second half of the year to be better than the first, but will not be able to achieve its previously announced adjusted operating margin guidance of for the full-year 2012.
The company has continued to win new contracts in the first half of this year however, including the supply of GPON equipment in Bulgaria and a potentially major IPTV customer in Brazil.
The revelation comes just a day after Chinese rival ZTE issues its own profit warning, stating that earnings for the first half of 2012 could be down as much as 80% year-on-year.
So far Alcatel-Lucent has managed to avoid massive layoffs – unlike Nokia Siemens Networks – or the sale of core operations, though CEO Ben Verwaayen will certainly need to consider these options if he is to appease the company’s increasingly restless shareholders.
