AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
By Mike Angell
Investor's Business Daily
Boom, bust. Best of times, worst of times. Bang, whimper. Take your pick. They all describe pretty well the fiber-optic telecommunications equipment industry this year.
A spending surge by telecom networks made tiny companies worth billions, put Canada on the map for high tech and threw into doubt the future of a 131-year-old company once owned by Alexander Graham Bell.
But customers weren't getting bac
k what they were spending. And a pre-Halloween earnings call scared away $56 billion in investors' money.
"This industry is cyclical and can't grow forever," said Sanford C. Bernstein &Co. analyst Paul Sagawa. "Telecom carriers binged too long and too hard. They're working through a serious liquidity issue."