Just four months into the job, Ben Verwaayen, the chief executive of the struggling telephone equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, said he had had enough of the naysayers.
And they have been plentiful.
Competitors have questioned Verwaayen’s decision to remain in the wireless equipment business, the fastest-growing part of the industry, where Alcatel-Lucent, the fixed-line leader, trails Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.
Investors have been underwhelmed by a reorganization announced in December that will eliminate 1,000 management jobs and 5,000 contract workers from a 77,000-member global work force.
And former employees say that a clash between French and American workstyles — Alcatel was based in Paris, Lucent in New Jersey — has cost Alcatel-Lucent business as the economy sours.
One former employee, who left for a competitor last year and asked that he not be identified, called the company “an Amtrak-TGV train crash.”
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Verwaayen, a feisty 57-year-old Dutchman fluent in English, said he was “very grateful for their concerns and their love and care for us, which is really very heartwarming.” During a wide-ranging interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the wireless industry’s biggest convention, Verwaayen insisted that he was “confident that you will find a company that is alive and kicking, a company that is a force.”
Verwaayen said Alcatel-Lucent was poised to regain market share after stumbling for two years following its $13 billion merger. Since the merger, in November 2006, the company has posted euro 9.4 billion, or $11.8 billion, in losses and euro 7.9 billion in write-downs.
Although the company expects global demand for telecommunications equipment to fall by 10 percent this year, Verwaayen said Alcatel-Lucent’s comeback would begin in vast, lucrative markets like China, where the company is bidding to supply the three largest operators with their first high-speed wireless networks.
“We are among the top four wireless…