STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
NPR business news begins with high-tech job cuts.
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INSKEEP: The French and American telecommunications manufacturer, Alcatel-Lucent, confirmed this morning it plans to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide. A company statement said 2,100 of those cuts will be from its operations in North and South America.
Now Alcatel-Lucent has been losing money for years. About a quarter of its staff are based in the United States, where the company runs the Nobel Prize-winning Bell Labs research facility.
Today's announcement appears to be part of a restructuring aimed at shifting the company's focus toward high-speed broadband and Internet products. The cuts are planned by the end of 2015. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.