Lucent Technologies
More info
- Released
- 1996–2006
- Type
- Telecom equipment
- Successor
- Alcatel-Lucent, later Nokia
AT&T's equipment arm, with Bell Labs in tow — the most widely held stock in America during the dotcom years and a textbook bubble a few years later.
In 1996 AT&T spun off its manufacture of switches, transmission gear and telephones into a separate company. Bell Labs, birthplace of the transistor, Unix and C, came along with it. Lucent sold to carriers building out networks at a frantic pace, and its shares became a favourite with retail investors.
Part of that growth rested on Lucent lending money to the very customers buying its equipment — vendor financing. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000–2001, the customers went under, the loans went bad, the stock collapsed, and tens of thousands of jobs went with it. In 2006 Lucent merged with France's Alcatel. Alcatel-Lucent was in turn bought by Nokia in 2016, which is how a Finnish company came to own Bell Labs.