Speaking with Fairfax Media in Amsterdam, where the Broadband World Conference was held last week, Sean O'Halloran said he believed the reduction of staff in Australia would be "very, very minimal" and that he didn't "see much of an impact" from the global cuts.
"Australia is a very healthy business for Alcatel-Lucent, especially with the new strategy we have around the Shift [Plan] which includes the direction around the job cuts," he said.
The plan was first unveiled by global chief executive Michel Combes in June. It aims to "reposition Alcatel-Lucent from a telecommunications equipment generalist to an industrial specialist in IP networking and ultra-broadband access (mobile and fixed) at the heart of next-generation networks".
Last week, Mr Combes told radio station Europe 1 the company's future was at risk if it could not execute the turn-around strategy. "Yes, this company can disappear," he said.
The Franco-American group previously unveiled plans to slash 10,000 jobs worldwide, from a workforce of 80,000 by the end of 2015. It argues the cuts were its last chance to stem years of losses. This includes 3800 jobs from the Asia-Pacific region, 4100 from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and 2100 from the Americas. It would also halve its business hubs around the world.
So far there has been no indication of the number of jobs at threat in Australia. Mr O'Halloran wouldn't quantify the potential losses, but said its Australian business hub was "not at all" at threat of closing.
"We see ourselves being around for a long time," he said.
"We've been here for over 115 years," he added, describing how one of the companies Alcatel acquired helped build the first telephone exchange in Australia.
"We actually feel very much a part of the ecosystem," he said.
Alcatel-Lucent's Australian business has already cut about five per cent of its 700 to 800 person workforce in recent years and embarked on further cost-cutting measures.
The latest global cuts were aimed at "getting back into good business practice", Mr O'Halloran said.
"If you look around in business it's not an unusual practice. The scale might be bigger than some but it gets us back to the right sort of ratios in the industry.
"It's a financial imperative if you like ... we can't keep burning cash."
The redundancies add to simmering ICT job losses in Australia due to offshoring and cuts by other giants such as HP and IBM.
IBM alone is expected to offshore more than 1500 Australian jobs this year and has already made several hundred employees redundant.
Technology workers in banking and other large industries have reported being fired but only after training people in India, China or the Philippines or workers on 457 visas to do their jobs. Government agencies have also shed IT jobs, with the Queensland government announcing in June that 1700 IT jobs were likely to go.
