Alcatel–Lucent S.A. (French pronunciation: [alkatɛl lysɛnt]) was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France.

The company focused on fixed, mobile and converged networking hardware, IP technologies, software and services, and operated between 2006 and 2016 in more than 130 countries.

The enterprise business was sold to China Huaxin Post and Telecom Technologies in the same year,[1] and in 2016 Nokia acquired the remainder of Alcatel-Lucent.

[8] Western Electric began in 1869 when Elisha Gray and Enos N. Barton started a manufacturing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio, US.

[8] CGE was formed in 1898 by French engineer Pierre Azaria in the Alsace region of what was then Germany and was a conglomerate involved in industries such as electricity, transportation, electronics and telecommunications.

Bell Labs would make significant scientific advances including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, the digital signal processor chip, the Unix operating system and the cellular concept of mobile telephone service.

The joint company used the existing manufacturing and development facilities in The Hague, Hilversum, Brussels and Malmesbury as well as its U.S. resources to adapt the 5ESS system to the European market.

The joint venture company AT&T & Philips Telecommunications BV doubled annual turnover between 1984 and 1987, winning major switching and transmission contracts, mainly in the effectively captive Netherlands market.

[8] Ben Verwaayen was appointed as chief executive officer in September 2008 after Alcatel-Lucent's first CEO, Patricia Russo, and first chairman, Serge Tchuruk, resigned.

Also, a $10 million tax incentive was provided from the State of Ohio, to assist in the relocation costs and keep the telecommunications workforce in the region.

[18] After seven consecutive years of negative cash flows, in October 2013 the company announced plans to cut 10,000 employees, 14% of the 72,000 workforce, as part of a €1 billion cost reduction effort.

[21] On 1 October 2014, the company announced that it had closed the sale of its subsidiary Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) to China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center.

[22][23] Alcatel had a long history of domestic and global work in laying the infrastructure of undersea routes for telecommunications.

[24] Purchases by Alcatel in the 1990s included the Enderby's Wharf site on the Thames in London, where cables were made from the 1850s;[25] and Les Câbles de Lyon at Calais, established in 1891.

[26] Starting in 2000, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and Louis Dreyfus Armatuers (LDA) had a partnership called ALDA Marine.

[28] The cable-laying fleet at that time consisted of: Since Alcatel was a manufacturer of telecommunication components for undersea cables, they also used company repeaters in their operations.

Alcatel-Lucent used DWDM technology to transmit SDH frames over nine stations connecting South Africa to Sudan using this undersea fiber cabling type.

[30] In 2011, the Alcatel CS Ile de Sein assisted in recovering the Air France Flight 447 data recorder in the Atlantic.

[37] On 15 April 2015, Finnish telecommunications firm Nokia announced its intent to purchase Alcatel-Lucent for €15.6 billion in an all-stock deal.

The acquisition aimed to create a stronger competitor to the rival firms Ericsson and Huawei, whom Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent had surpassed in terms of total combined revenue in 2014.

[citation needed] In 1937, Clinton Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.

[citation needed] In 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, William Shockley of Bell Labs invented the transistor.

[citation needed] In 1964, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation.

[citation needed] In 1969, Dennis Ritchie and a team of Bell Labs employees invented the UNIX operating system and the C programming language.

[citation needed] In 2006, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were awarded the National Academy of Engineering prize, for work on charge-coupled devices which transform patterns of light into useful digital information.

[52] In 2014, the company was named Industry Group Leader in the Technology Hardware & Equipment sector in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices review,[53] and was listed in the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators for the fourth consecutive year.

[54] In December 2010, Alcatel-Lucent agreed to pay a total settlement of $137 million for bribing officials in Costa Rica, Honduras, Malaysia and Taiwan in violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

The first part of the case involved two audio coding patents that Alcatel-Lucent claimed were infringed by Microsoft's Windows Media Player application.

[citation needed] In May 2013, Newegg and Overstock won a victory in United States circuit court in which an Alcatel-Lucent shopping cart patent was invalidated.