Like my beloved Montreal Expos (now a distant memory), the speculation into Nortel’s future for the last many years has been bleak. Once the poster company of Canadian High-Tech, it has been on a downward spiral since John Roth left with a wallet full of cash. It didn’t stop there. It’s been hard to keep track of which executives took what amount of cash and who was the subject of investigations by the SEC and governments for which accounting practice.
If the reports are to be believed, this week is the do-or-die week for the ailing company. The company could be two days away from bankruptcy, two days away from purchase or two days away from just another day.
I don’t believe that the Canadian government will let Nortel collapse. Besides having invested heavily in Nortel-the-company over the years, the Canadian government depends on a lot of Nortel equipment to do business around the clock. We’re talking about telephones, telephone switches, data switches, routers, VPN gateways, etc… If Nortel manufactured it, it’s probably in a Canadian government datacentre or office somewhere. A Nortel shut down would mean the equipment would no longer be supported and that’s a business, operational and security risk the government can’t afford. The outcome could be crippling.
So, I’m forecasting some sort of bailout.
Of course, I could be wrong.
