Alcatel-Lucent's CDMA business declines in 1Q

Alcatel-Lucent's mainstay CDMA business is on the decline, the company reported. That decline and the faltering economy resulted in a 6.5 percent decline in wireless network sales year-over-year, despite the fact that the vendor doubled ts sales in WCDMA.

Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo predicted that growth for the company would be flat in 2008, but that the improvements in the W-CDMA business would continue. The company plans to integrate its 3G product lines later this year, giving it a single GSM and WCDMA platform to support and significantly lowering its R&D costs. Russo also said that as the industry transitions to 4G deployments, Alcatel-Lucent is well positioned to sell both LTE and WiMAX technologies as well as hybrid solutions that mix GSM and WiMAX as well as CDMA and LTE.

"We're poised to capture a 4G footprint by leveraging our existing customer relationships as well as our expertise in some of the key technology areas that are relevant to 4G, spanning both LTE and WiMAX," she said.

To read more about Alcatel-Lucent's first-quarter results:
- check out this Telephony report [1]

Related articles:
Alcatel-Lucent directors back Russo [2] 
Alca-Lu Q4 dividend cut [3]