Lucent said it expects revenue for its third fiscal quarter ended June 30 to be about $2.04bn, down $100m sequentially and down $300m compared to both analysts’ estimates and its actual performance a year ago.

The firm blamed weakness in its North American mobility business and lower sales in China. It’s an echo of the story told when its second fiscal quarter numbers missed targets back in April.

With Alcatel, Lucent also announced that their merger will close before the end of the year, within the six to 12 month window promised when the $34bn deal was announced back in March.

Massive job losses will ensue. The companies plan to lay off about 9,000 people, according to a joint statement issue. That’s a hair more than the 8,800 layoffs announced in March. Without layoffs, the companies would have had a combine staff of roughly 86,000.

These layoffs with account for about 55% of the $1.7bn annual cost savings the companies hope to have gained by the end of the third year of the merger. Another 30% will come from reducing cost of goods sold.

More cost savings will come from closing or making more efficient use of real estate. This will about to about $122m at the end of three years, the companies said.

The companies also hope to knock $305m off the costs of supply chain and procurement activities, which currently stands at $10.6bn, again by the end of year three.

Finally, the firm hopes to save $488m by rationalization its product line, converging products and migrating customers to a combined product set.

The combined company will be split into three groups – Carrier, Enterprise and Service. The Carrier group will be split into wired, wireless and converged, headed by Michel Rahier, Mary Chan and Marc Rouanne respectively.

The Enterprise Business Group will be headed by Hubert de Pesquidoux. The Service Business Group will be headed by John Meyer.

The companies have passed Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust review in the US, and have approached the European Commission to seek approval there.

While the EC has historically been more of an obstacle for these types of things, much of the political speculation when the merger was announced centered on the labor unions in Alcatel’s native France, which could see many of the layoffs.