Praying for bull rather than bear

Who'd be a telecoms company these days? The news from the sector in recent weeks has been one of unremitting gloom as company after company announces plans for drastic cuts in workforces to try to return to viability.

Even NTL, which gave a bullish outlook with its quarterly figures on Thursday, also took the opportunity to announce further job cuts.

Presumably, its bullishness came from the fact that it was not in the position of the likes of Lucent, Nortel or Alcatel, whose Irish staff must wait to see how they will fare amid plans to shed between 15,000 and 20,000 jobs each.

Worse still is the plight of US group JDS Uniphase, the world's largest maker of fiberoptic components, which is this year cutting 16,000 jobs - more than half its workforce.

The sector has proved the most vulnerable to the downturn in technology investment. We are familiar with the debris in the computer sector, with even Microsoft and Intel no longer sure of the future, to say nothing about Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, Compaq and Dell.

But it was telecoms which made the biggest investment gamble in the promised online revolution. Now the chickens have come home to roost and, in the US at least, telecoms have lost more in terms of market capitalisation and jobs than even the dotcoms . . . now there's an unenviable record.