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Sharp Overwhelmed By Volunteers For Early Retirement
jfruh writes "Sharp, the Japanese LCD supplier in dire financial straits, is trying to cut staffing by offering an early retirement package. Unfortunately, it seems Sharp employees are eager to abandon a sinking ship. The company was planning on cutting its headcount by about 2,000 employees with the move; instead, it had to cut short the program after getting nearly 3,000 applicants."
a very bad sign.
Let's just hope this doesn't make Sharp dull...
your workforce...
Is this article trying to point out that the company having to offer retirement packages is going to hurt them financially or talent wise?
A lot has been written about Sony, especially in Japan where it was THEIR giant taking on the world. Sony USED to be a tech company run by techs. Googles 20% work on your own project sound nice? Pah! At Sony entire teams could work 100% on stuff that nobody knew could ever work. Then around the millennium a new guy was put in charge and he did not come up through the company as a tech but was strictly management. He too wanted to streamline the business and get rid of dead wood old engineers. It worked BRILLIANTLY. Not only was the package VERY attractive so all who could, took it but new jobs were waiting with little upstart companies like Samsung but I don't suppose you ever heard of them. Oh wait, isn't that the dingy Korean company that makes cheap Japanese knock-offs. Well, they can never compete because Japan has all the know-how locked up in job contracts... OOOOPS!
It was an epic brain drain and one Sony never really recovered from. It wasn't their only mistake but it was a hell of a nail in the coffin. Sharp did better, Sharp still has a reputation for Japanese made (and for the very old and very young, there was a time when Japanese made meant quality of an insane degree even the swiss found hard to beat. A Sony TV just worked, yes it was expensive but it just worked. And then management took over, streamlined the business and that stopped. Samsung quality is catching up but only because Japanese quality is going down.
Note that the asian giants on the rise are NOT streamlining their business and all the western ex-giants have streamlined themselves to dead. The simple fact is that pure managers can't see the next hit, the Walkman and the PS were things no manager could have seen. For sony to enter the console industry against the giants in that sector was considered insane.
When the techs left and management took over, Sony lost its edge. In the west people only know Sony the electronics giant same as say Nintendo. Did you know Nintendo once made a vacuum cleaner? Post WW2 Japan grew a tradition of little workplaces were people were busy trying to come up with anything to produce and export. Because with no natural resources and a devastated economy, that was the only way Japan was going to make money. Building thingies, firs cheap and crap, then cheap and okay and finally expensive and bloody good. And they did this at the cost of western companies that were to busy stream lining their businesses.
If your young, name a WESTERN TV maker. That actually still makes TV's. Every western household has a TV but who supplies them? The asians. Yeah, that worked out well, for the asians but the likes of Philips? Shadows of their former self as they focussed on their core compentency in existing shareholder meetings. PIty that it turned out loosing money is their core compentency.
You can see it with Hostess. I said it before, as a EU person I can't see the big deal, their snacks just ain't that good. When was the last time they extended their product range in a significant way? And I don't mean a chocolate twinkie but as a TV company, making a walkman, producing a game console. Look at how much flack MS is getting for daring to go into hardware. Streamlining your business is just another way of saying "we are closing down". In tech, the next big thing needs to be researched yesterday if you want to launch it tomorrow. Except the real time line is measured in decades and you will have many failed research projects in the mean time. But you got to do that if you want that massive hit.
Another reason that racing to the bottom never works is because there is always someone at the bottom waiting to take your place. Sharp can't keep in the display race, that just means the next iPad's displays will be all Samsung, now boosted by the free to hire Sharp engineers.
Surely Sharp knows the history of its major rival. Things must be dire indeed to follow the path of certain doom.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
About 1 million Americans have saved enough for retirement and would retire right away if affordable health insurance was available to individuals. They all hang on till they are 65 (some till their spouses are 65) to qualify for medicare.
In our company one of the very rich founders, a real genuine millionaire, was working as the CFO for the salary of 1 $ a year plus healthcare!
If Americans can buy health insurance at affordable prices, as individuals, not as part of a group, so many would go part time, or move to start ups or start their own companies or even take long breaks. So many Americans who have health insurance through their jobs fight tooth-and-nail any attempt to de-link healthcare from employment. But it is a devil's bargain, as long as this system continues, it is yoking so many people to the jobs they hate.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fascism advocates a state-controlled and regulated mixed economy.
de-linking will also stop some of the hours games / temping that some companies do to get out of needed to give people health insurance through the job.
I can two types of people who would jump at the chance for early retirement:
1) People actually close to retirement
2) People who are not close to retirement, but know they have the skills to get another job
The person who is barely scraping by at their job? Not going to jump ship (unless they are planning on changing careers). I see this as a fine way to lose some of the best and brightest really quickly.
Hell, every time our management talks about reductions or outsourcing my hand goes up. A nice package for leaving so I can coast for a couple weeks then look for a new job? Sure, sign me up!
Sharp wants to get rid of it’s employees voluntary, so the severance package has to be sweet. This is particularly true in Japan, where the chance of a older worker finding new, full time employment is slimmer than in other countries.
And it’s early retirement – which implies their pensions kick in. Maybe not at 100% - but it should be kicking out income for the rest of their lives.
A lot of people are getting ready to retire and just like in the US, their social retirement program (think: SSI) is not funded well enough to support all of these people. However, unlike in the US, they will likely live with their children since it's common practice to house your parents instead of sending them to a home. If you can get an early retirement package, it would almost guarantee your financial stability until you die, and seeing as how Sharp is quickly becoming blunt, the only reasonable thing to do is to retire early. Now just wait until this problem is found everywhere around the world, and not just from one company.
Ernie the unpackageable
http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=unpackageable&x=0&y=0
Oh My!!
I have two Sharp TVs, both less than 3 years old.. Oh well, I shoulda bought a Zenith! ;-)
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Your right, Sony SHOULD have created the iPod. In fact, during the Samsung/Apple trial it became clear BOTH had been looking at work Sony was doing for inspiration. So... where did these Sony phones that inspired the iPhone end up?
Sony had done their own tech before the management take over but they did because they thought they had the superior system. Afterwards they did it for pure lockin reasons, like the mini-disc fiasco. It should have just supported MP3, I had one that I purely used with selfmade discs and it was damned good (still works) considering the alternatives (tapes, HD, CD and very small flash). But they didn't until it was way to late. Because management wanted to combine business interests instead of going for the best solution.
Sad.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.