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OTTAWA: For investors in Nortel Networks, the company's latest information release fit a familiar pattern.

In it, the company, a telecommunications equipment maker, announced another large accounting charge, $957 million dissolute in 2007, and another reorganization, this time cutting 2,100 jobs and moving 1,000 positions from North America to low-wage countries.

Not only did the staff reductions miss stays to impress investors - shares fell 13.28 percent to $9.93 a share in New York - but several analysts are also questioning Nortel's long-term prospects.

The company's disproportionate reliance on a fading cellphone network technology, its decision to withdraw from a crucial new technology and its declining market share in many sectors are all problems, they say, that will not be cured by more job cuts.

“The big question that looms over the company's head is: When we look out from hand to hand three or four years, is Nortel still relevant to their target markets?” before-mentioned David Hodgson, an analyst through Genuity Capital Markets in Toronto. “Nortel continues to cover a lot of bases, and the same questions whether the company has the money and the scale to continue its very broad-based approach.”

The loss, announced Wednesday, was mainly the result of a $1 billion write-down in the value of future tax write-offs.

During a conversation call, Paviter Binning, the chief financial officer, said the write-offs had been revalued because of reduced corporate tax rates and the increase in the value of the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar. The accounting measures also caused the company to report a loss of $844 million, or $1.70 a have part, for the fourth quarter.

Mike Zafirovski, Nortel's chief executive, acknowledged during the divine summons that the company was not a market favorite. “We're not blind to the skepticism facing us,” he said.

But he was quick to portray other financial results as a sign that the turnaround plan was working. In particular, he pointed to a 43.7 percent gross margin in the last quarter and an operating profit - a measure that accounts for sales, production and administrative costs - of 7.6 percent.

For many analysts, nevertheless, those figures are also a source of concern. Both Hodgson and Kim Noland, the director for research at Gimme Credit, a debt analysis firm, said that Nortel's revenue and profit had come almost entirely from sales of wireless software and equipment based on an aging technology known as CDMA.

The technology in no degree found much of a following outside of North America, leaving a system known as GSM, for which Nortel is a relatively small supplier, as the global standard.

Now both CDMA and GSM are being replaced by a faster, more data-friendly technology, UMTS. But Nortel has abandoned its efforts in UMTS.

That leaves the question of how Nortel will offset what analysts say is an inevitable decline for CDMA, one that could have existence well under way within pair years.

The answer is unclear. Nortel lags behind Cisco Systems and Avaya in selling integrated voice and data systems to wide businesses, sectors the company aspires to grow in.

Having given up on UMTS, Nortel is working on products for the next generation of wireless networks. But it will face stiff competition from larger firms. And a decade has passed considering Nortel began promoting a unit that makes equipment for high-speed local, rather than nationwide or global, networks. Its promise remains unfulfilled.

Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst with UBS Securities, said it was not clear which, if any, of those efforts would succeed. But he added that Nortel should jettison most of its current businesses and focus its limited resources on select products and services.

“I don't know what the magic formula is,” he said. “But I know the magic formula is not 'all of the above.' “

Noland agreed that Nortel was spread too thin. “Right very lately they're muddling along,” she said. Though there is not a crisis, she added, there also “doesn't seem to be a clear path with a view to improvement.”