Hopkins exits Lucent

(Telephony) Deborah Hopkins, the former Boeing executive brought in to instill discipline into Lucent’s financial management and reporting systems and rebuild investor confidence, is leaving Lucent after just one year as the company’s chief financial officer.

In a statement released by the company, Hopkins said, that with Lucent’s restructuring program and financing in place, “it’s the natural time” for her to leave and “purse other opportunities.”

Hopkins was hired by former Lucent CEO Rich McGinn in April 2000 and received a $4 million signing bonus. During Hopkins’ embattled tenure, Lucent recorded billions of dollars in operating losses, became the target of an SEC probe, saw its debt lowered to near-junk status, and announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs. But Hopkins also helped negotiate $6.5 billion in new financing at a time when rumors swirled that Lucent was going bankrupt.

“I don’t think you can say [Lucent’s] turnaround is anywhere near completion,” said Lawrence Harris, managing director at Josephthal & Co. “We’re still in the early stages. It’s not a job completed.” Lucent also is negotiating the sale of its fiber-optic cable unit and outsourcing agreements with contract manufacturers. Lucent today announced that APW’s purchase of a Lucent metals, plastics and tooling manufacturing plant in Bydgoszcz, Poland, had been cancelled.

One of the issues that might have alienated Hopkins from current Lucent management was the change in the company’s level of enthusiasm for vendor financing when Chairman and CEO Henry Schacht arrived, Harris said.

“At Boeing, the commercial finance operation is very much a profit center,” Harris said. “When [Hopkins] initially arrived, she saw [Lucent’s financing operation] could be made into a profit center--and that certainly did not turn out to be the case,” he said.

Frank D’Amelio, former group president of Lucent’s Switching Solutions Group and previously chief financial officer of Lucent’s Network Systems business, was named the new chief financial officer. D’Amelio began his career in 1979 at Bell Laboratories and later AT&T and is said to possess more operational experience than Hopkins.

Lucent also announced that it is merging its switching and data networking units into one unit called Switching Solutions and InterNetworking Systems Group. Jane Davidson, formerly group president of InterNetworking Systems, will assume responsibility for the new unit.

The product group will encompass next-generation softswitch platforms, the IP services platform and network operations software, in addition to ATM and frame relay switching, voice over IP, remote access, DSL services and terabit routing.

“The time is right, for Lucent and for the technology, to combine our switching and data networking businesses in a way that best meets the needs of larger service providers,” Schacht said in a statement.