Corporate restructuring in the telecommunications equipment industry: The case of Spain in the late twentieth century

A new technological paradigm coupled with a powerful wave of deregulation and liberalisation that was unleashed worldwide from the 1980s onwards acted as a catalyst for profound transformation in the telecommunications equipment industry, which was dominated at the time by large multinational corporations. These developments, in turn, led to worldwide restructuring in the sector. The present paper hypothesises that the sector’s oligopolistic structure remained, but that it did so under the leadership of new global players that sought to impose their strategies in response to the prevailing conditions. The paper also aims to explain the reasons for the global restructuring in the sector by looking at the strategies, choices, and decisions of the involved multinationals from the viewpoint of the nation-state. Based on the assumption that a separate analysis of one national unit can help to understand the process as a whole, the paper draws on primary sources to describe and analyse the adjustment path within Standard Eléctrica, a Spanish subsidiary first of IT&T and then of Alcatel.