Lucent sees hope amid the turmoil

Business Asia, Nov 2, 1998

Despite Asia's troubled financial climate, Brunei, China, the Philippines and Taiwan have been major growth areas for Lucent Technologies over the past 12 months.

Lucent is a US$26.4 billion company with about 130,000 employees worldwide.

The company designs, builds and delivers a range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronics components.

In Brunei, the company won a US$30 million contract to construct a backbone telecommunications network infrastructure for Jabatan Telekom Brunei (JTB), the government-backed sole provider of fixed-line telephone services.

Once completed, the project will provide JTB with a high-capacity optical network, and offer customers more bandwidth and high communication speeds for multimedia and data applications.

The network is expected to be completed by the latter half of 1999.

JTB has also signed a contract to buy US$17 million worth of Lucent's telephone network switches and related equipment to improve its telephone service.