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  3. Another week, another crop of bad news from the telecoms industry. Bernie Ebbers, the chief executive of WorldCom, has been forc

Another week, another crop of bad news from the telecoms industry. Bernie Ebbers, the chief executive of WorldCom, has been forc

admin2015-04-10  3
问题     Another week, another crop of bad news from the telecoms industry. Bernie Ebbers, the chief executive of WorldCom, has been forced out. The share price of Qwest, another heavily indebted American telecoms company, fell to an all-time low, after it had announced a first-quarter loss of $698 million. Siemens, a German company, said it would cut 6,500 jobs in its telecoms-infrastructure division, on top of 10,000 layoffs already announced. Marconi and JDS Uniphase, two other network-equipment vendors, announced or gave warning of gloomy results, and Telewest, a struggling British cable company, said that it would cut 1,500 jobs.
    Even as the broader economic climate begins to improve, the carnage in telecoms continues. "No bottom in sight" is how analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos puts it. He notes that, historically, the telecoms sector tends to recover six months later than the economy as a whole. But this time, he says, there is evidence of bigger structural problems in the industry that will not be solved by an economic recovery. That suggests the industry must undergo painful rationalisation before things start to improve.
    How did this happen? Telecoms is an infrastructure-intensive business, and infrastructure takes a long time to build. So telecoms firms have to gamble on the level of future demand. In recent years, however, their bets—in both fixed and mobile telecoms— have gone spectacularly wrong.
    In fixed-line telecoms, the problem is overcapacity. During the Internet boom, operators assumed that demand would continue to grow by 100% a year indefinitely. A vast construction programme ensued, fuelled by cheap capital. At its height, says Andrew Heaney of Spectrum, a consultancy, telecoms operators built seven years’ worth of capacity in a single year.
    The result was a capacity glut, ferocious competition and frantic price-cutting. Traffic growth has not translated into extra revenue. Fixed-line operators have now cut their infrastructure spending to focus on picking up clients rather than expanding their networks. All of this is terrible news for equipment vendors. Two of the biggest, Nortel and Lucent, have cut around 50,000 jobs apiece in the past year or so.
    Operators of mobile networks also made what turned out to be an ill-judged bet on future demand. With voice revenues stabilising, the industry hoped that new data services, piped over "third generation"(3G)networks, would provide growth. But consumers in most parts of the world have been far slower to embrace new data services than the operators had hoped. Worse, European operators hobbled themselves with huge debts by overpaying for 3G licences.
    Investors now worry that mobile telecoms is merely a low-growth utility, rather than an industry on the verge of a new phase of explosive expansion. The uncertainty has had a knock-on effect on wireless-infrastructure vendors, who were banking on selling vast amounts of 3G equipment. Ericsson and Motorola, for example, are each laying off more than 40,000 workers.
    In short, even though Internet traffic continues to grow and mobile phones remain popular, telecoms firms bet everything on a surge in demand that has so far failed to materialise. Backing out of these bets is proving to be very unpleasant. The carnage will continue for some time yet.
Which of the following statement is ture according to Nikos Theodosopoulos?
选项 A、The telecoms industry will recover in six months’ time.
B、The telecoms industry will suffer an ever-lasting carnage.
C、Things in the telecoms industry are likely to get worse before they get better.
D、Telecoms problems can be solved after the broader economy has recovered.
答案C
解析 根据尼古斯·本奥多索帕罗斯的观点，下列哪一项表述正确?[A]电信业将在6个月内实现复苏。[B]电信业将会永远持续惨状。[C]在电信业好转之前，事情可能会变得更糟糕。[D]电信业存在的问题在整个经济复苏之后会得到解决。文章第二段中引用了尼古斯·本奥多索帕罗斯的观点。他认为电信业的惨状“目前还深不见底”，并指出，从历史上看，电信行业的复苏往往比整个经济的复苏晚六个月。但是这次有迹象表明这一行业存在经济复苏解决不了的更大的结构问题。这表明，这一行业必须经过痛苦的合理化过程，情况才能开始有好转。由此可知[C]符合这个意思。[A]和[D]的意思都与他的观点不符．[B]文章中没提及，
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