Global Crossing
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Global Crossing Ltd. is a major telecommunications company that provides computer networking services worldwide. It maintains a large backbone and offers transit and peering links, VPN and VoIP, mainly to large enterprise customers and other carriers as it is a tier 1 carrier. The company is legally domiciled in Bermuda although its administrative headquarters are in New Jersey.
It rode the dot-com boom of the 1990s to incredibly high market values, only to go bankrupt a few years later. Its stock price hit a high of US $64 per share, and would eventually plunge to below $1.
Company chairman Gary Winnick, and former CEOs Leo Hindrey, and Thomas Casey were examples of the excess of that era, each one taking personal fortunes while costing shareholders billions.
In January 2002, the company declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, making it the fourth largest insolvency in United States history. By December 2003, the company completed its restructuring and emerged from bankruptcy, after Singapore Technologies Telemedia bought a two-thirds stake in the business.
It has remained a major name in the business, and it also became a corporate partner of various governmental and academic networks, such as the UK's Immigration and Nationality Directorate, the U.S. government, European academic networks GEANT, SURFnet and others, the US Internet2 and the Canadian CA*Net.
Since emerging from bankruptcy, the company has attempted to re-focus its business around enterprise customers and de-emphasise its historic wholesale business, with some limited success. A new strategy, articulated in October 2004, has enabled it to turn around its performance in its core business while improving margins. It secured additional funding from its parent STT in December 2004 and anticipates becoming cash flow positive by the end of 2006, although at present it continues to burn cash.
The on-line account maintenance and ordering tool for Global Crossing Ltd is called UCommand.
External links
- Global Crossing: (http://www.globalcrossing.com/) Official site
- Yahoo! - Global Crossing Ltd. Company Profile (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/57/57204.html)de:Global Crossing