time to go back and ravage the home country!
If your company doesnât mind having a supply chain with a 6 month lead time and products with no QC. I donât know how they handling currency fluctuations these days, but that can be a bear trap.
Itâs a very basic thing, but itâs amazing how many people in positions of power miss it: itâs harder to care, and harder to care about your product, when the people who will consume it are not part of your community. Itâs become a standing joke in customer service, with companies making it a selling point when they have domestic call centres. Itâs similar for tangible goods.
Oh, and those high manufacturing wages companies complain about? Henry Ford started that. He wanted his own workers to be able to afford what they made at the plant.
Having worked in a company with global locations, I can tell you that remote business of any sort is a pain in the ass, and the more remote the worse it gets. This is not a slam against China/India/etc, but more that the less time that management or leadership gets to spend with those teams, the less that those teams absorb the culture or goals that management is trying to drive (for better or worse). One of the worst remote teams Iâve ever dealt with was in Fargo, ND, which is as american as you can get but was still a nightmare.
Yeah, currency fluctuations. How in the hell would you handle that?
We have to have reached peak centralization.
What, it turns out neoliberal economics is a crock of shit and Milton Friedman is a false idol?
Rape, pillage and destruction isnât a sustainable business model?
Geez.
Knock me down with a feather.
So, the EU is investigating Gazprom for abusing its market power
Gazpromâs immediate response seemed aimed at elevating the issue to a matter of international relations. Gazprom suggested that it was not subject to the European Unionâs antitrust jurisdiction because it is a state-controlled company. It signaled it was effectively an arm of the Russian government, âempowered by the laws of the Russian Federation with special socially significant functionsâ and with âthe status of a strategic government-controlled business entity.â
It is not mere greed that motivates Gazpromâs actions. Rather, Europeans are getting squeezed for political reasonsâŚ
Iâm sure the Europeans will look kindly on this plea.
Wapo is junk. Wapo is the Fox of broadsheet print news.
If globalisation is not paying off then why exactly has Gross World Product increased so dramatically since globalisation became a practicality?
Increase in population, you say? Well that started 100 years after the uptick in GWP:
Unregulated international financial derivatives? What could possibly go wrong?
The paradigm fails when the engine of Capitalism loses touch with what fuels it.
Wow! Did I just say that? Way too obviousâŚ
Even giants like GM, the biggest bettors on globalization, arenât getting the returns on capital that they expected.
Of course they arenât getting the returns they expected. Because they are the biggest bettors. Why did they bet the most? Easy: they had bigger expectations of returns than the rest of their competitors. Which means that everyone else thought the returns were lower, and guess what, reality matched more closely the average than the optimistâs dreams. If the world consistently matched the expectations of the people who invested the most, it would look very odd indeed.
Further, what does Chinese manufacturing ventures have to do with car sales in China? For GM the point is about one thing specifically - to take advantage of low wage costs and a permissive regulatory framework to build cars cheaper. You donât have to build cars in China to sell them in China! Thatâs the whole point of âglobalisationâ.
Thereâs a sad/promising trend of manufacturing returning to the developed world â sad because decades of globalization have driven down domestic wages, promising because of the return of industry to advanced countries.
This behaviour is by design. Globalisation produces competition between labour markets, allowing companies to bid down wages. Big business is not âlosing bigâ when labour markets have to accept painful wage stagnation to make them return to domestic manufacturing. This is just the next round of the process working as intended.
These companies dress themselves up in the national flag now, because they want to have the position to demand China etc give them a better deal. Itâs all about profit.
Was this story posted using a computer made by Apple? Are people reading it using Samsung telephones or Lenovo laptops, possibly Dell desktops?
The tech industry is one of the most globalized industries in the world. It also happens to be wildly successful for the major innovators, who also happen to be some of the key globalizers.
So, globalization isnât paying off for companies hoping to export old technology? Whenâs the last time we heard anything innovative coming from GM?
The derivatives can be actually useful. That was why they were originally invented. Itâs handy to know for sure that my profit wonât be wiped out by an exchange rate fluctuation; well-worth paying the insurance called option.
That the useful tool gets abused and becomes dangerous on its own is a separate problematics. It is kind of like blaming a gun for a murder.
All of the items you mention are dead easy to test for quality as part of the production process, and dead easy to replace if one of them is a dud. Items with moving parts, or items with fluid, ever-changing shapes (Iâm thinking of the garment industry) â not so much. Iâve bought plenty of clothes which were supposed to be the same size and fit â same make, same style, same size tag â but werenât.
Besides, Samsung is an Asian company with factories in Asia, so Iâm not sure itâs the best poster child for globalisation. People who live relatively near their headquarters produce their goods. Dell, on the other hand, and Apple both have received a lot of criticism for reduced quality when they outsourced their production to overseas from their headquarters.
Criticism, yes. But theyâre making lots of money. Thatâs âwinningâ if youâre a business.
Ah, but are they making money because of outsourcing, or in spite of it?
Outsourcing doesnât make a company any money in itself â itâs supposed to save money, but as the OP and many other articles have noted, it can actually increase costs.
I do see outsourcing in some form as useful, especially if youâre contracting out to a company within your own geographical region. You could be successful by outsourcing halfway around the world, but the risks are far greater than originally admitted. While some companies have made it work, others have scaled back or pulled back entirely.
