Alcatel

Alcatel SA was a French industrial conglomerate that was active between 1963 and 2006. It had roots in Compagnie Générale d’Electricité (CGE, lit. "General Electricity Company"), a conglomerate founded in 1898 as an early state-owned cable and telephone equipment company that later expanded into construction, shipbuilding and energy. In telecommunications, Alcatel was a major supplier of digital telephone switches, terrestrial and submarine transmission cables, satellite equipment, cellular infrastructure, DSL access equipment and others. Alcatel (originally short for Société Alsacienne de Constructions Atomiques, de Télécommunications et d'Électronique; roughly translates as Alsatian Society of Atomic Constructions, Telecommunications and Electronics) was formed in Mulhouse as part of SACM, an engineering company group. During the late 1960s, the company was absorbed by Compagnie industrielle des télécommunications (CIT), the telecom division of the conglomerate CGE. CGE was nationalised by the French state in 1982, only to be privatised five years later. The firm was renamed to Alcatel Alsthom in 1991, and finally to just Alcatel in 1998 after divesting Alstom, the railway vehicle manufacturer, to focus solely on telecommunications. In 2006, following the acquisition of the American telecom company Lucent Technologies, the company was renamed to Alcatel-Lucent S.A.. Ten years later, Alcatel-Lucent was itself absorbed into the Finnish telecoms specialist Nokia. Today, the Alcatel name survives in Alcatel Submarine Networks (telecomms), Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (software), Alcatel Mobile (mobile telephones) and Atlinks (fixed-line telephones).