NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's pathetic to see a former CEO of a major company made a mockery of in court. It's even sadder to see a stock go up when a company sheds thousands of jobs.

Then again, it's good to see that what remains -- after the glitzy trial, after the painful cuts -- isn't an illusion but rather a real company with real products, real revenues and nearly real profits.

Such is the state of Tyco as 2003 rolls to a close.

Its former CEO is on trial for actual charges beyond having poor taste, for which, if it were a crime, Dennis Kozlowski already would be locked up.

But as I've written here at $11 a share and more recently at $21, Tyco isn't a sham. It just looked like an imitation of General Electric with a joker at the top.

What the company proved again Tuesday morning is that it's now being run by serious business people who are making tough decisions about what should stay and what should go.

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In the process, Tyco's (TYC: Research, Estimates) new management -- under former Motorola executive Ed Breen (wonder if the leaderless cell-phone maker wants him back) -- is producing profits and deleting its debt.

That won't provide much comfort to the 7,200 souls who'll lose their jobs as a result of the restructuring Tyco announced Tuesday.

But perspective is important. Those cuts represent about 3 percent of Tyco's workforce. The businesses Tyco is exiting, most of which it hasn't yet identified, account for $2.1 billion of revenue, or about 6 percent of Tyco's total.

This isn't slicing and dicing. This is prudent repositioning.

And it explains why investors reacted gleefully, bidding Tyco's shares as high as $22.55, a 7 percent jump.

Other reasons investors were jazzed:

• The company generated $500 million more in free cash flow in fiscal 2003 than in fiscal 2002.
• Its revenues were about flat year-over-year, not a bad accomplishment considering all the cleaning up that needed doing.
• Tyco repaid $1 billion in debt in its fourth quarter alone and still had $4.2 billion in cash lying around, $300 million more than it had at the end of June.

At $45 billion in market capitalization, Tyco remains one of the most valuable companies in the United States, No. 89 by my count.

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That means we'll keep paying attention to it for a while.

My prediction, though, is that after the trials fade and after the financial performance becomes more normalized, we'll think of Tyco as the boring collection of industrial companies that it is.

Boring, to be clear, will be a good thing.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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