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Gene Ellis

Iowa Beef Processors, Boxed Beef and a New Big Four - 0 views

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    Article by David Warsh on tech. change
Gene Ellis

In Japan, the Fax Machine Is Anything but a Relic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Handwritten messages have long been a necessity in Japan, where the written language is so complex, with two sets of symbols and 2,000 characters borrowed from Chinese, that keyboards remained impractical until the advent of word processors in the 1980s.
  • But its very success has made the fax a hard habit to kick.
Gene Ellis

Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings
  • Hours later, BofA said it would be exiting operations in Costa Rica, Guadalajara, Mexico and Taguig, Philippines, without saying how many jobs would be lost. Costa Rica’s foreign investment agency said the BofA move would result in 1,500 layoffs.
  • “This is a strong call to the country to keeps tabs on things like the rising cost of electricity, telecommunications, wages and social guarantees.”
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  • The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.
  • In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.
  • California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.
  • n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE
Gene Ellis

Why Apple Got a 'Made in U.S.A.' Bug - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Today, rising energy prices and a global market for computers are changing the way companies make their machines.
  • Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.
  • “It’s important that they get an order in five days,
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  • there is a pride for the local consumer to see a sticker that says ‘Made in Tokyo,’
  • Cook is looking to give Apple some good news.
  • In 1998, President Bill Clinton visited a Gateway Computer factory outside Dublin to cheer the role of American manufacturers in the rise of a “Celtic Tiger” in technology.That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China
  • A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
  • More recent products, laptops and notebook computers, were in many cases originally assembled in China, and they are still largely made there. So are most smartphones and tablets. Every week, H.P. sends a group of cargo containers filled with notebooks to Europe.
  • The labor cost on a notebook, which is about 4 to 5 percent of the retail price, is only slightly higher than the cost of shipping by air. Soon even that is likely to change because of the twin forces of lower manufacturing costs from automation and higher transportation costs from rising global activity.
  • Intel, which makes most of the processors, has plants in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Israel, Ireland and China.
  • Many other chip companies design their own products and have them made in giant factories, largely in Taiwan and China. Computer screens are made in Taiwan and South Korea, for the most part.
  • The special glass used for the touch screens of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, however, is an exception. It comes primarily from the United States.
  • As cheap as a Chinese assembly worker may be, an emerging trend in manufacturing, specialized robots, promises to be even cheaper. The most valuable part of the computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.
  • That plant was shut in 2001, when Gateway elected to save costs by manufacturing in China. Dell, which made its mark by developing lean manufacturing techniques in Texas, closed its showcase Austin factory in 2008 as part of a companywide move to manufacturing in China. A Dell factory in Winston-Salem, N.C., for which Dell received $280 million in incentives from the government, was shut in 2010 (Dell had to repay some of the incentives).
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