Market changes and the focus on large service providers have led us to take this decision

Lucent spokesman

Instead, Lucent will concentrate on selling products to a few major customers.

"There was clearly a niche that was to be filled by Chromatis but market changes and the focus on large service providers has led us to take this decision," said Hans Kettenbach, a spokesman for Lucent based in Germany.

Lucent has "30 customers around the world that account for 75% of revenues", said Mr Kettenbach. "It's only natural we increase our focus on this group of customers."

Chairman and CEO Henry Schacht: restructuring needs 'to go deeper'

In July 2001, Lucent said it would sell its fibre optic cable division to Japanese firm Furukawa and US fibre-optic cable-maker Corning.

Global cutbacks

The division employed abut 6,000 people and had sales of about $2bn (�1.4bn) in 2000.

Lucent also reported it had moved into the red, making a loss of $1.2bn, excluding one-off items, for the third quarter - far worse than expected. In the same period last year it made a profit.

The company said it intends to return to profitability in 2002.

Worldwide, it has trimmed its workforce by over 30,000 this year in an effort to adapt to the US slowdown and the collapse of many dot.com companies.