Nortel's Nadir

LOU BEACH FOR TIME

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In the past few months, Canada's telecom industry has been a cautionary tale. It's now increasingly likely that Nortel Networks Corp., the biggest maker of telephone equipment on the continent, will emerge from bankruptcy stripped of many of its most valuable assets along with its ambitions to be a world beater. Meanwhile, Montreal-based BCE Inc., parent of the country's biggest telco, Bell Canada, has continued its slide since a record $42.1 billion deal to privatize the company was abruptly killed in the final weeks of 2008.

And the harsh reality is that the situation will get worse--perhaps much worse--not only in Canada but also around the globe for once powerful telcos and their suppliers.

Technology shifts can be wrenching, but it's not as if telcos and their suppliers didn't know that wireless would eventually prevail in telephony. Yet unlike their new and younger rivals, Nortel, Lucent and other wire-line-equipment powers have found it difficult to take market share in next-generation technologies such as Internet telephony and wireless broadband. Recession has served, as it often does, to fast-forward a power struggle that promises to reshape forever how we communicate and consume media.

In hindsight, the attempted takeover of BCE--the all-time biggest leveraged buyout in corporate history, led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, with backing from U.S. investors including Providence Equity Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity--was doomed from the moment it was signed in 2007. Less than two months later, global equity markets began to wobble, and credit got scarce. BCE's value sank from the take-out price of 34.62 a share to 16.85 on an auditor's report that debt from the proposed LBO would render the company insolvent. (Shares of BCE, with annual revenues of $14.3 billion, have since recovered to about 20 on the NYSE.)

It looks far worse for Toronto-based Nortel Networks, a key supplier to North American telcos and once the brightest light in the Canadian economy. It was worth $250 billion, or about 35% of the total market capitalization of the Toronto Stock Exchange, before it flamed out in the post-dotcom bust. Earlier this year, Nortel, a company with $10.4 billion in annual revenues that has spent nearly a decade mired in accounting scandals and feckless attempts to reinvent itself, initiated bankruptcy proceedings. It will probably sell its most prized assets to chief rivals, including Nokia Siemens Networks and Avaya. It's a penny stock.

Why have things gone so terribly wrong for two of Canada's once esteemed telecom giants? What's happening in Canada is a reflection of a fundamental power shift taking place globally. Once untouchable telcos and their suppliers, including Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom, have become mastodons stuck in a tar pit. They are surrounded by a host of new technologies and hungry cable companies, wireless operators and handset providers with low-cost solutions and must-have apps. These competitors and their supply chains are smarter, faster, more aggressive. And they're gobbling up business in the $1.7 trillion global market for telecom services, including traditional fixed lines, at a ferocious rate.