It blamed the costs of the merger and insisted that things are looking up, with expectations of sales growing 10 percent sequentially in the current quarter, and between 4 percent and 6 percent for the year as a whole.
The company did show a net profit $268 million when counting the sale of its transportation, security and space assets to Thales, representing a one-time gain of $913 million. On the other hand, the company calculated the drop in sales at 12.4 percent (using current exchange rates), rather than the less- ominous-sounding 7.9 percent as calculated using a constant euro:dollar exchange rate.
Comparing the current quarter on an apples for apples basis as if Alcatel and Lucent had been a single company a year earlier, revenues from carrier infrastructure sales were down 10 percent to $3.83 billion; sales of wireless gear down 15 percent year-on-year to $1.6 billion; and the convergence division, which includes IPTV and IMS systems, down 28 percent to $469 million. Enterprise sales were up 12 percent to $501 million, and services were down a small 3 percent to $846 million.