Woke up too early this morningÖ.had some time before the kids woke upÖ..needed to do something other than drink more coffee so decided to check out Nortel's SEC Q3 filing. Hey, guess what? Nortel's got strategy. It includes the following:
- "renewed commitment to practice and ethical conduct".
Translation: no more cooking the books no matter how tempting the financial incentives;
- "a streamlined organization structure".
Translation: possibly more layoffs but definitely no more martinis on the expense account
- "increased focus on enterprise market and customers".
Translation: Convince people it's not all Cisco, all the time.
- "optimized R&D programs".
Translation: more engineering jobs to China
- "establishment of chief strategy officer".
Translation: we need to establish a strategy.
- "strategic review of embedded services to assess opportunities in the professional service business.
Translation: study Lucent's business strategy.
- "a distinct focus on government and defense customers".
Translation: Call CEO Bill Owens' former colleagues and ask for some business.

Didn't see anything about strategic acquisitions or the sale of weaker units (i.e. optical) but perhaps that will come in the annual report.

Om Malik must be a happy man today after Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. was acquired by Yahoo Inc. - a deal disclosed/predicted by Om, who wrote about the company last year in Business 2.0. Vancouver-based Ludicorp makes popular photo-sharing software called Flickr, which lets people share photos on the Internet. Flickr, which was started by the husband-and-wife team of Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, is particularly popular with bloggers because you can "tag" photos and then easily share images with other people. Yahoo apparently scrouged up some loose change of US$30-million to US$35-million for Ludicorp, which can now be added to the growing list of North of the Border (NOTB) technology companies snapped up by cash-rich U.S. players.

Ronald Gruia writes that Nortel is enthusiastic about its Asian prospects based on the belief China will finally issue 3G licenses before the end of the year. Nortel apparently believes its incumbent position with China Unicom and a joint venture LG will lead to big business. That said, there wasn't much positive news for Asia for Nortel in the third-quarter of 2004 as sales fell 37% to US$227-million. For all the deal-making Nortel has done in Asia in the past six months, most of its competitors have been pursuing the same strategy while domestic suppliers are becoming more aggressive in and out of market. Given the rough times ahead, the appointment of Gary Daichendt as Nortel's president and COO makes a lot of sense given he's an operations expert - i.e. he's going to find ways to reduce costs even further through exercises such as improved logistics.