Hurray, Mike Z. Gets Rewarded!

It's good to be the king.

I'm confused,..outsourcing the current positions to lower cost locations will save the corporation money,..yet that savings incurred is rolled back into the executives salaries?
Now the real question is, how much money would the company save if MikeZ and his facegrabbing cronies had their positions relocated to lower cost locations?

Pigs at the trough for a company losing money.

What a bad jokes in poor taste this company's arrogance continues to display with board members still sitting on the voting audit committee to approve huge lottery sized pay practices. So many still there remain too, new auditors replace those of long standing after so many insider only CFOs. Even the SEC finally wants progress reports on the repair of their unreliable accounting and numbers worse every time counted, as the RCMP lay criminal charges in this saga. It is endless…

Ask any lawyer in the Toronto area about their pay practices to see. This CEO makes more than BCE's for heavens sake and they paid a premium for him after he defrauded his past employer on several written occasions. What a shoe in as he promotes than fires his pal who also got an increase.

Has anyone also noticed how these guys reward financial innovation and post profits? Triple profits after settlement followed by revisions they downplayed to double / then mark-to-market profits due to tanked settlement shares thanks to these revisions, then exchange rate profits as operations just keep on a tanking…

As if calling 20 bucks extreme 10X reverse split a buying opportunity was not enough, they claim they can manage a much larger company before axeing thousands more in their death spiral. Endless hype followed by endless contradictions strikes me as ongoing lies after settling one of the largest fraud settlements on earth..

But hey! Bonuses all around! <hickup>

Endless contradictions makes me question the ultimatum settlement as no better reason to show why we do not negotiate with terrorists.

Pre extreme 10X reverse split, Nortel called $3.05/shr. “fair” settlement as it trades at 87 cents today, before the defrauded are mailed their cheques and as even a green team's pay increases for a company losing money.

What's changed? For the better anyways…

This saga has to be seen to be seen to believed.

Turning off vending machine lights saves Rciahrdson $4000 per year.

I see from the SEC report that Dion J., Steve S. and Peter Currie all got hugh severance pay outs. I wish I would have been fired from Nortel….

Anyone want to buy some network gear.

Now we know what the “ACCELERATION” theme in Vegas was all about. Forget about boosting morale among the sales force for the Americas. This was a facade for the executive leadership to get even more compensation in 2008 than they did in 2007.

And what a tab they ran up only to stick it to the shareholders in the end.

Nortel sucks, Im off to Alcatel

Not sure why you all are complaining?
You had clear instructions: “Lead”, “Follow” or “Get Out of the Way”

Being in Management I made my own rules, to hack with what Z says.

Lead – Ha ha !! You make me laugh. Try to lead and I will make sure I shut you down. I have been working at Nortel just right after dinosaurs went extinct. I am expert at avoiding any accountable situation. You do not know anything; you are new kid on block. You do not know how things work around here. Just shut up and give me my weekly report.

Follow – Although I am not sure where to go, I just want a troop behind me. You know it looks good. I just need to keep showing my management that my position is important and that I am adding real value to Nortel. We both know that I am not adding any value but keep your mouth shut or I will give additional projects like 48 hours case resolution.

Get Out of the Way – Are you kidding me? I am getting too good of salary and bonus to quit and I am also waiting for my package  (wink wink). You can leave. I am going to hire new grad who is willing to work lot more hours than you will and also not question my leadership (not really sure what that is but I like the word)

all of u who work at the lower rungs making lower salaries will be taken out first. it is cheaper to get u out the door.

some fat senior person will then take your job.

stan if you can hook me up at alcatel as well let me know. I'll take either that or Cisco. Chambers may make 5 x what Z does, but at least he gets results.

It is sad things are heading this way because as Novice says, it is a great company unfortunately it's the middle management idiots that are ruining it.

For those folks who Alcatel/Lucent is their next stop, they still have to go thru a restructuring and will likely let many employees go in Nortel America before France as at the end of the day its a French company and its much easier to shed workers in North America. Alcatel/Lucent is about where Nortel was in 2002. More layoffs and further writedowns ahead.

Looks like Nortel has about $ 3 Billion more of this type of liability. I wonder if Mike Z will write them down 4Q of 08? His reasons were the change in the dollar value, and we all know the dollar value is going to change more in 08, in the same direction. I guess we should expect this to happen again. I also assume it will come with another 2100 lay offs of the “dead wood” and the relocation of another 1000 jobs.

Humm, a rosy picture is not forming for the near term future of Nortel.

The big problem still is clients will look at Nortel and wonder if it will be around in the next 2, 3, 5 years, etc…. Lets not make it too easy for sales to peddle Wimax to the world (joke).

John Roese's Blog
CTO Nortel

…. WE'RE ON A JOURNEY ….

The one point from our announcement that might be worth highlighting in order to clarify some confusion around the loss we reported is related to the deferred tax asset write-down that Nortel took. Without the tax write-down Nortel actually had net income of $154 million. I’m not a tax expert, so in order to explain it I thought I’d copy here the explanation that Peter Look, our VP of Tax, shared with employees in response to a number of questions that came in on our employee blog:

“What are the Canadian deferred tax assets? In Canada, Nortel has about $1 billion of unused R&D tax credits, $1 billion of tax losses from previous years and about $0.5 billion of future tax deductions not claimed on any tax returns yet. We “wrote-down” a portion of them in Q4.

Could we have avoided a write down? No, we’re required every quarter under accounting rules to look at how much we can reasonably expect to use and over what timeframe we think we can use them. A lot of factors come into play in making that judgment. Please note that this is just “accounting” and that the tax benefits are still available for us to use as future conditions warrant.

Why now? There were a convergence of events in Q4 that interacted negatively with each other. Among them were 1) a 3.5% tax rate cut enacted in Canada in late-December which stretched the time horizon to use the R&D credits and 2) a continued strong Canadian dollar versus the US dollar (about .85 in beginning of year versus close to par at end of year) that devalued the stream of future Canadian taxable income (expected to create the tax to be sheltered by the assets), because our Canadian business unit earns a bunch of its income in US dollars.”

Bottom line: We’re on a journey to transform this company to once again be the great company that it was, and we’re making progress. I came to Nortel about 1.5 years ago to be part of what I continue to believe will be a tremendous transformation story. And, I’m as committed now as I was then to helping drive that transformation.

Novice Investor,

Got it that Nortel is on a journey. But the issue still remains, the same debt is on the tax books (I realize no real loss it is just funny money) for the sum of $3 Billion. I don’t think anyone thinks the dollar is going to get stronger in 2008, so why wouldn’t Mike Z and team do the same thing is 4Q2008? I assume it would have the same devastating results to the price per share.

Got any ideas to make this a happy thing?

I think when its all said and done even the Cisco's and the Nokias of the world will be slashing their revenue forecasts. IT and Carrier budgets are going to be pared further. When economic activity slows down with a sharp drop in consumer spending carriers will be forced to pare back spending. And finally once the US slows down, the world will follow. There will be no decoupling.

Soooo, I think I've got it. They are on a journey. They are using their air miles to pay for “VPs of Tax” and exorbitant executive salaries with >20% raises. Experienced employees are so much useless baggage.

that's like going from the Lightning to the Panthers…have fun with that.

As an employee of Nortel I'm appalled !!!!! I think they we're feeding us cocaine or another dug at the Sales Conference! — we bit, we believed! now this —- we employees (if we were in the top 10%) received a 3.4% increase max !!!

As for investments !!!!! You have people in development designing products and intrfaces 5+ years old… no committment and most products slide and the people in these groups continue to ask the sales force for statistics about what the martket needs…. I say kick these useless people out… they have no idea of what they're doing…