This week PCCW went private and red ink flowed in the vendor sector.
PCCW shareholders accepted a $2 billion deal to take the company private. In an apt finale to a controversial decade in the public eye, claims of vote-rigging overshadowed the final vote.
Motorola lost $3.6 billion and its CFO after handset sales halved. It now has 6.5% of the global device market.
Lenovo sacked its American CEO and replaced him with chairman Yang Yuanqing. Co-founder Liu Chuanzhi returned as chairman after it posted a $97 million loss and PC shipments fell 5%.
Panasonic announced 15,000 job cuts after its expected $335 million profit turned into a $4.2 billion loss.
Alcatel-Lucent posted a $5 billion loss after a hefty goodwill writedown. But it made a quarterly operating profit and expects to break even this year.
Cisco's net fell 27% as John Chambers warned of possible layoffs if the economy deteriorated further.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said he won't seek a bonus for 2008 and senior managers won't see a raise during 2009.
South Korea plans to boost broadband speeds to 1Gbps by 2012. Time Warner plans to expand its metered broadband trial.
The MIIT ordered China Telecom and Unicom to shut down Xiaolingtong by 2011. The PHS service has nearly 70 million customers.
CSL said Hong Kong's $193 million LTE spectrum auction was expensive, but it now has more spectrum than anyone else in the market. Nortel threw its lot in with LTE after dumping mobile Wimax.
IDC said Asian telecom services markets would grow 8.9% in 2009. Gartner predicted that within three years North American businesses would support more cellphones than desktop phones.
The Obama stimulus package awaited Senate approval, promising $20 billion on digitization of health records and $6 billion on broadband.
Announcing an 18% jump in profit, Tandberg said cuts in corporate travel budgets have boosted sales of its video-conference gear.
Telstra began the hunt for a new CEO. Skype released version 4.0 after a year of public testing. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined a storage startup. IBM won a five-year outsourcing contract from Sony Ericsson.
Swiss police stumbled across a marijuana crop worth $780,000 while using Google Earth. Super Bowl viewers in Tucson were shocked by a 30-second clip from a porn film.
And 4,000 iPhone users downloaded an app developed by a nine-year-old Singaporean boy.