The Rise and Fall of Nortel: The $250 Billion Company That Vanished in a Decade

In September 2000, Nortel Networks was worth C$398 billion, more than a quarter of a trillion US dollars. It was more than a third of the entire Toronto stock index, employed 94,500 people, and its CEO had just cashed in C$135 million of options and been named Canada's chief executive of the year. Two years later the stock was 47 cents. The company reported the largest quarterly loss in Canadian history, laid off 60,000 people, engineered a "return to profitability" that unlocked $70 million in executive bonuses, was quietly read by hackers in Shanghai for most of a decade, and on January 14, 2009, filed for bankruptcy rather than make a $107 million interest payment. Its patents sold for more than all of its businesses combined. Its pensioners lost up to 40 percent. Nobody was convicted of anything. This is File 004 of The Collapse Files: how billion-dollar companies die. CHAPTERS 0:00 The auction 1:36 The factory 3:36 The right-angle turn 5:39 A third of the country 7:30 The morning after 9:18 The cookie jar 11:40 The room in Shanghai 14:00 January fourteenth 16:15 The Nortel file Sources include the Wikipedia entries for Nortel, Timeline of Nortel and Frank Dunn; the SEC's March 12, 2007 complaint (SEC v. Dunn, Beatty, Gollogly and Pahapill) and October 2007 settlement release; CBC News on the Q2 2001 loss, the 2013 acquittal and the Telfer School study "Nortel failed amid 'culture of arrogance'"; The Globe and Mail, "A tale of toxicity"; The Wall Street Journal (2012) and Global News (2020) on the Shanghai intrusion and Brian Shields; TechCrunch on the June 2011 patent auction; and CBC, Benefits Canada and Pensions & Investments on the pension wind-up. Archival images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain and CC0 where marked, plus CC-licensed photographs by Iouri Goussev (Nortel Carling Campus, CC BY-SA 2.0), Neverether (Nortel DMS-100, DMS-250, DMS-10, CC BY-SA 4.0), Pdesousa359 (DMS-100 trunk controller and line cards, CC BY-SA 3.0), Nbinr1 (Nortel Meridian PBX, CC BY 2.5), Cephas (Northern Electric N415H, CC BY-SA 4.0), Denis Tremblay / Parcours riverain (Northern Electric, rue William, CC BY 2.0), Thomas1313 (Northern Electric Building; Osgoode Hall, CC BY-SA 3.0/4.0), ed100 (NASDAQ MarketSite, CC BY 2.0), Scoutguy5427 and Dennis G. Jarvis (Ottawa skyline, CC BY-SA 4.0/2.0), Ken Lund (Bay Street; Toronto Courthouse, CC BY-SA 2.0), mark.watmough (Bay Street, CC BY 2.0), RG72 and Liuxingy (Huawei Shenzhen, CC BY-SA 4.0), Travis Wise (Cisco San Jose, CC BY 2.0), David Samuel and Saffron Blaze (Parliament Hill, CC BY-SA 3.0), Philippe Du Berger (Montreal c. 1900, CC BY 2.0), P199 (Kanata, CC BY-SA 3.0/2.5), Florian Hirzinger (CERN server room, CC BY-SA 3.0), Mike Beltzner (server room, CC BY-SA 2.0), Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA (fiber installation, CC BY 4.0), SwarmCheng (optical fiber, CC BY-SA 4.0), Stealth Communications (fiber crew, CC BY-SA 3.0), Bidgee (Telstra fibre pit, CC BY-SA 2.5), Hitman Abhi (BlackBerry Waterloo, CC BY-SA 4.0), Holger Ellgaard (Ericsson Kista, CC BY-SA 3.0), Geek2003 (Avaya, CC BY-SA 3.0), C0pMer (Ciena 6500, CC BY-SA 4.0), James38 (Mike Zafirovski, CC BY-SA 3.0), Mw12310 (Nortel Networks Centre Sydney, CC BY-SA 3.0), Wiper Mexico (Torre Nortel, CC BY-SA 3.0), Takuya Nakayama (Nortel Millennium payphone, CC BY-SA 4.0), Mister rf (Nortel GBIC, CC BY-SA 4.0). Archival footage from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org: ESS (1965); The Incredible Machine (1968); The Nation at Your Fingertips (1951); Speeding Speech (1950); Story Without End (1950); Long Distance (1941); Far Speaking (1935); Century 21 Calling (1964); On Guard! The Story of SAGE (1956); What Makes Us Tick (1952). Music from the YouTube Audio Library: "Missing Persons" (Jeremy Blake) and "Little Drunk, Quiet Floats" (Puddle of Infinity). Additional scene illustrations were created for this film; no real person is depicted. Narration is synthetic. #Nortel #CorporateCollapse #RiseAndFall #Documentary #DotComBubble #Telecom