Lucent sells New Ventures portfolio

Lucent Technologies has sold a majority interest in its New Ventures Group (NVG) portfolio of companies to London-based Coller Capital.

The sale, which has been completed, gives Collar Capital an 80% equity stake in the NVG portfolio. While no dollar amount has been announced, sources close to the deal put its value at just below $100 million.

Formed in 1997, NVG took niche technologies developed by Lucent-owned Bell Labs and gave funding and support to start-ups based on these ideas.

With the recession, Lucent has reworked its business plan to focus on large service-provider customers, bringing NVG’s role within the company into question.

“We’re sharpening our focus on the world’s largest service providers,” said a Lucent spokesman. “When you look at what New Ventures Group did, it took technologies that lied outside our core offerings.”

With this sale, Coller Capital and Lucent are creating a separate company, New Venture Partners II, to manage the New Ventures Group companies. The core NVG Team will move to NVP II to manage the portfolio.

According to the Lucent spokesman, the focus this structure provides should help the portfolio companies succeed.

In other Lucent news, company Chairman and CEO Henry Schacht said in a letter to shareholders that the “operating environment in the coming year will remain challenging.”

The statement, found in Lucent’s 2001 annual report, comes just more than two months after the company reported lower-than-expected earnings for the fiscal fourth quarter 2001 while promising a return to profitability in fiscal 2002.

Lucent’s will report its fiscal first-quarter earnings on Jan. 22.