Alcatel 1 | explainer video made with ngram

About the video

This explainer video was made with ngram to examine the financial bind Alcatel faced in 2003, when the French telecom company's three-year R&D spending and its restructuring costs each reached 4.5 billion, an identical figure. It traces how the industry's shift from fixed-line to mobile phones forced Alcatel to pay twice over, once to innovate and once to wind down the past, while Nokia, Ericsson, and later Huawei moved faster. The video notes Nokia's 2015 acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent as the outcome of that slower pivot, and closes by questioning whether the company's decline should be blamed on its leadership or on French rules that make shutting down a failing project cost an average of 38 months' salary per employee.