Faced with declining sales worldwide, especially in the United States, Nortel Networks will lay off another 5,000 workers, bringing to 15,000 the number of redundancies to be made by the Canadian fibre-optic maker before mid-2001.

Nortel's shares dropped $3.45 or 20.58 per cent, to $13.31 on the news, which helped drag down the Nasdaq by 5.36 per cent by mid-evening.

Nortel blamed a wider firstquarter loss and lower than expected sales last month and said its 20001 predictions were unreliable.

The Toronto-based company employs 94,000 people worldwide and has a major presence in Ireland, with 2,400 staff in Belfast, 730 in Galway, 50 in Dublin and 45 in Shannon. Nortel has already announced it will shed 40 jobs in Galway as part of its February 21st decision to cut 10,000 staff worldwide. A spokeswoman for Nortel in Toronto told The Irish Times yesterday: "At this time it is not known where those redundancies will be made. They will be all over the world. We have the rest of 2001 to determine the numbers."

Nortel, the world leader in the manufacture of fibre-optics, said it now expected a loss from operations of 10-12 US cents a share. Analysts had expected a loss of four cents a share.