Nortel files for bankruptcy

news.yahoo.com

19 points·mixmax··4 comments

I am sad for Nortel. I did an unpaid internship course in high school at Nortel which was a great experience and best of all, at the end I got 300$ bonus. This was in 1999 back when Nortel was on top of the world. They were the company people wanted to work for in the Ottawa area.

They were a real company before the hi tech boom and were corrupted by it. They suffered a decade of poor management that saw them through stock options scandals, accounting restatements, and general stupidity. I remember spending half the money I earned one summer on Nortel stock after the bubble popped figuring Nortel was at ~50$, they cant go any lower.

Sad, but not unexpected.

I went through a year-long internship program as part of my CS degree, during the period in late 2000 and 2001 when the bubble burst. Nortel sucked in more people from my class than any other employer. Since they had to agree not to lay off students, interns were often the only ones to survive the early layoffs. There were people who watched their entire department fired several times over.

It made for some interesting stories, but not a lot of people who wanted to return after graduation.

In mid-2000, at the zenith of the company's success, they were worth more than C$1,100 each, adjusted for a stock consolidation that took place in late 2006.

Wow, what a free fall.

"It's obviously a remarkable transformation from where it was as the largest company in Canada worth about 35 percent of the TSX in 2000," said Gavin Graham, director of investments at BMO Asset Management.

Wow, indeed! Over one third of the entire value of the Toronto Stock Exchange during the bubble. I don't know much about the business aspects of Nortel, but I bet they'll be subject of many b-school case studies.

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