LAST OF THE MOHICANS STANDS DOWN AFTER YEARS OF BATTLING
By FT Reporters
FT
July 30 2008 03:00
Serge Tchuruk, 70, who is standing down as chairman of Alcatel-Lucent
after almost two turbulent years, was seen as one of telecoms’
great survivors.
A former arms engineer born to Armenian parents in Marseilles, Mr
Tchuruk climbed the corporate ladder to become head of the oil group
Total before joining Alcatel in 1996.
He had spent more than 30 years in the oil and chemicals industries,
and appeared to hanker after the energy business’s greater
predictability. He told the FT in 2003: "When I was in the oil industry
it was much easier – you knew what demand was and could easily predict
your output."
As boss of Alcatel, his frustrations with the uncertainties of the
telecoms sector led to fierce clashes with the analyst community. He
once branded credit rating agency analysts pompier pyromanes , or
"pyromaniac firefighters", who precipitate the very crises they
forecast.
Having steered Alcatel out of a profound management crisis, he
endured the internet bubble and then three years of losses. The
company returned to profit in 2004, and survived a severe downturn
in the sector.
Mr Tchuruk engineered a restructuring of the sprawling Alcatel empire
into the core telecoms activities, a defence branch (which became
part of Thales) and the Alstom industrial engineering group.
His tenacity as other t elecoms chiefs came and went earned him the
nickname "Last of the Mohicans".
That resilience – and tireless deal-making – was underlined at the end
of 2006 when Alcatel agreed to merge with Lucent Technologies. Mr
Tchuruk had come close to a "transformational" tie-up with the
company in 2001 when negotiations were aborted at the 11th hour amid
US concerns about French ownership.
His departure from Alcatel-Lucent is likely to reopen speculation over
the future of the group’s 20.8 per cent stake in Thales, worth about
â~B¬1.5bn ($2.3bn), which Mr Tchuruk was reported to have wanted to
keep. Thales shares dipped 2.1 per cent in afternoon trading yesterday.
As Alcatel-Lucent staggered through six quarters of losses and its
market capitalisation halved, rumours grew that it was considering
selling the Thales stake.
Mr Tchuruk’s reign of dealmaking at Alcatel-Lucent is over. "It is now
time that the company acquires a personality of its own, independent
from its two predecessors," he said yesterday.
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