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Seagate Fires 6,500, Or 14% of Workforce, Stock Soars (zerohedge.com)
turkeydance quotes a report from Zero Hedge: [Seagate] announced today an additional restructuring plan for continued consolidation of its global footprint across Asia, EMEA and the Americas. The plan includes reducing the Company's global headcount by approximately 6,500 employees, or 14% of its global headcount by the end of fiscal year 2017. The total pretax charges for the plan will be approximately $164 million in fiscal year 2017. The restructuring activities and global footprint consolidation underway should enable the Company to be operating within its targeted Non-GAAP product gross margin range of 27-32% by the December 2016 quarter. "Computer-memory specialist Seagate announced that its Q4 revenue would be $2.65 billion, beating expectations of $2.34 billion, and up from the $2.3 billion guidance given previously," reports Zero Hedge. "The company also reported gross margin of 25% and non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 25.8% for the fiscal fourth quarter 2016, up from the previous 23% forecast. Good news, and the stock is up 12% after hours as a result."
Get rid of 100% of the workforce. Just think what that will do for the share price.
"Good news, and the stock is up 12% after hours as a result."
Well...good news except for the 6500 people you just fired. But as long as you got paid, that's all that matters, eh, Mr Investor?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
let go.
"Specialist"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
"Computer-memory specialist Seagate..."
Try again:
"Computer storage specialist Seagate..."
Memory â Storage.
Did the Seagate stock price go up because of the layoff or that the S&P 500 broke records today?
and we can replce people with H1B's as HR will say that people will not be happy to be rehired at a lower rate.
Because someone crunched numbers that weren't there. And then turned around and didn't crunch some numbers that were there.
And the stocks go up and the jobs disappear.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I was once fired for reasons that were not my fault and it delayed my benefits by almost a month. Sucked, royally.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
for your local nationalist party.
#1: he used the term fired when he really should have said layed-off. Fired indicates terminated for cause.
#2: Computer-memory specialist Seagate, obviously this indicates he does not actually know the industry he is writing about and is just parroting back other information with no real knowledge of much of anything.
My rule is if I can find obvious really wrong things in the part I know about, no telling how many more errors are hiding in the details I don't know much about.
Why wait? You can shift your useless ass to Cuba today!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Before I bought a house in the favorable post-2008 market / housing crash I had thought of going to Central or South America an do IT work there, make a killing, and perhaps stay there. Im 100% spanish-english bilingual, you see.
Maybe it's time I sell / rent my house and do the south / central america thing anyway.
I've lost all faith in the US and in "Western Civilization." To the point where I"m almost ashamed of being American. That, from a 10-year veteran of the USAF.
I'm ashamed of what we've become. Maybe a decade or two down south .. way down south.. is what I need.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Firings seem to have little to do with profits in corporate america. Profits up? Youre fired!, Profits down? Gotta downsize! Profits neutral? We need to trim the fat!
I'm sure they have their reasons in the long run, but let it not be said that corporations behave rationally. You can't really, when profits is the goal.
I would boycott them, but segate has such a bad reputation for longevity already, I stopped buying them years ago.
-
I've been buying WD drives since Seagate drive quality has gone to shit.
They need to fire their management first.
Their drives were shit in the 1990's and have only gotten worse. I wouldn't trust any seagate drive as a paperweight.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Less customers to buy stuff though, because more and more and more and more people are either jobless or have less disposable income due to this bullshit and it keeps going on and it's starting to get bad.
I'm convinced we're on the tipping point, real close to it. The division between the rich and the poor is about to be truly exposed soon.
Which is not how it was. The government assigned jobs only if you couldn't find one yourself. Changing jobs wasn't difficult at all if there were no previous problems with authorities.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
North korea is looking for experienced personnell.
And i know lots of old east german and soviet citizens who are pining for the good old days...not
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Are you sure there was more to be proud of a few decades ago? What happens around the world today is, basically, the result of the fuckups the west committed in the last century.
You sure the difference isn't just that you're better informed nowadays?
Also don't kid yourself. Central and South America, as the rest of the world, is densely populated with people. There's just as much to be ashamed of there as in the US or where I live.
The only difference will be that it's new bullshit which gets you another few years to get used to and then fed up with. So that might be worthwhile.
Please try to be useful for once in your life and suck a bunch of cocks.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I use two computers regularly. I have two others that I employ occasionally, and am gradually being made the steward of quite a lot of others at work. I have another computer under construction. One of those boxes has a Seagate boot drive and a Seagate data drive. They have performed well.
I don't believe for one minute that Seagate's cuts will result in anything even close to the quality of those two drives I have not experienced the quality programs some have, and until this moment, I would have disputed them). So I have now taken Seagate off my list of potential hardware suppliers. Then can take a long, hard suck on my...whatever.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...gotta love capitalism.
If there were a system in place to help retrain these workers, get them new jobs, and importantly, help them retain their dignity, then this wouldn't have to be such a sad day. Capitalism is probably necessary, but not sufficient for a well functioning society.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
That is 14% worldwide. I wonder how many of those jobs are in the USA?
Or am I a pessimist?
How do you think he got the position?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Seagate Fires 6,500, Or 14% of Workforce, Stock Soars
Of those laid off, how much of that was due to improved productivity?
What were the roles?
Were these engineers?
Or workers whose jobs could be automated?
Or how many of these were "dead weight" or in redundant functions?
Or where people blindly laid off due to getting paid more than a certain salary cap, regardless of function just to make the spreadsheets pretty? *** (I've seen this.)
Some layoffs are totally destructive. Others are completely justified. I've seen both types. The article doesn't tell me shit about it.
It doesn't occur to us.
Well, in my personal experience GDR wasn't all that bad. A plural of anecdote is not data.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So, can we call it a bubble yet? Can we call it a recession yet? Can we call it a crisis yet? 1 in 6 children in the USA will go hungry tonight. Is that a sign of a healthy economy?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They could have kicked out the C-Level suits, just imagine what this could have done to the stock!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd vote for CEO and board, what kind of money do you think this could save!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are aware that you are posting spam on a webpage where a sizable portion of the regulars do have the means to start a DDoS, yes?
Just asking.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What do products have to do with stock prices? That's so last century.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cutting employees is a sure sign of a company in trouble, so why does the stock go up? Even with the fixation on quarterly results it doesn't make much sense to me. Are these all investors hoping that they will find another idiot to offload the stock to before it crashes?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
To clarify this: I can speak only for GDR, but AFAIK this was pretty similar in the USSR and other former socialist countries.
There was no social safety net at all. Instead there was a constitutionally guaranteed right to work. This right to work was not the same as the American right to work, but more like a right to a job and to a wage directly proportional to the qualification independent of age and sex. In additional to it, there was also, in fact, sort of a duty to have a job. This resulted in the government assigning jobs to people who wouldn't find one themselves. This is also why many factories weren't very productive - because they have employed people who didn't do much. That was a substitute to a social safety net that pays to the unemployed, so at least the people, who would otherwise be unemployed, were able/forced to do something.
On the other hand, people with a decent qualification usually applied for a job directly at the management of the so called public owned enterprises they wanted to work at instead of letting the government officials choose a job for them. They could also take a job that required less qualified people without any problem if they were in the mood for such a menial job (that was something similar to contemporary downshifting).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-...
This explains it perfectly.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
While some very dubious stuff happened on Reagan's watch there were not actually many people involved in it - mainly because of how dubious it was. The chain of command was told to go fuck itself. A Senator from Nevada was doing an end run around the military to fund one of the guys we are now fighting in Afganistan, let alone someone as low on the totem pole as North selling classified anti-tank weapons to Hezbolla via Iran. A few rogues on the political track had very little to do with the majority.
The problem is jobs come from consumer buying power, which is increased by consumers having more left over after buying things. If, for example, half the people making food go away but half the food does *not* go away, two things happen: half the money you were spending on food can be spent elsewhere; and the amount of money someone needs to live in the same standard-of-living as the food workers (before they were unemployed) is decreased.
100% of the cost displaced by bumping those workers out of their jobs is enough to cover their wages, because that *is* their wages (including payroll taxes, benefits, and such). The story's bigger than that: when the market adjusts--which takes months or years, and involves things like inflation and universal competition--the theoretical settling on the same profit margin means there's actually more. If something costs $100 and has a 10% profit margin, that's a $110 of price; if you eliminate 50% of that cost and keep the same margin, that's $55. If you bumped out $50 worth of workers, you somehow reduced the end-target price by $55.
I should explain universal competition. Each consumer has a set amount of income as a TIME FUNCTION: you have so much income per year. There's a total amount of income every year, meaning paying some people more means paying other people less (as a proportion of the total income). All income represents all labor time and, ultimately, all productive output, so a proportion of income represents a concrete thing, and thus flatly more dollars doesn't create more buying power (more output per time does, and more laborers do). Put these together and you realize the money you spend on food can't be spent on Pokemon games, and thus Pokemon is in some way in competition with food.
So a number of things happens here. First, the costs go down, and workers end up unemployed. Prices can, but often don't, reflect this immediately; direct-competition on even terms (everyone having similar technology) tends to drive prices downward as businesses attempt to capture market share, while indirect-competition tends to just lag price inflation behind monetary inflation (i.e. the amount of money in total increases faster than the amount of productive output; the prices increase slightly slower than that). This, eventually, means the profit margins go back to where they were, and consumers have more money to spend.
With the prices lower, a consumer can buy into the same standard-of-living with lower wages. Because of this, that theoretical $55 freed up when eliminating workforce costs might not translate into new $50 jobs; their new wages might be slightly lower (wages not keeping up with inflation), while part of the productivity gains float upward (widening income gap). This makes progressive tax systems useful: as that income gap spreads, you can leave tax rates at the top income brackets alone, and reduce the tax rates at the bottom income brackets, thus improving the buying power of the consumer base (creating jobs). This has the great political advantage of not raising taxes (notably, this works well if you can attract rich people to tax shelter in your country).
The new jobs come from consumers spending that $55 on new goods, creating demand and a need for labor. If we assume the new jobs also drive a business at a 10% profit margin, $55 can only create $50 of jobs. Again, as above, the wage might be slightly less.
On a large scale, a slightly-lower wage slides between "improved standard of living by the productivity gain" and "no standard of living increase". In any data point between these, you *create* new jobs out of the proportion not lost to rich people getting richer. That is: there is now consumer buying power to support $50 of product costs; we only need to pay workers $48 for those new products for them to buy all the stuff they used to buy when we were paying them $50; that extra $2 can pile up to pay for slightly *more* jobs.
So yes, it sucks a little when you lose your job; and th
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Even when it's regarding a function it can be the road to disaster if done badly. For example power plants have had to spend millions due to not making that "stitch in time to save nine". That recent chemistry grad is a payroll cost, got to cut those goes the mentality, but a capital cost for retubing comes out of a different money bucket. At least that mentality has given engineers lots of disaster porn to look at and give people examples of exactly what will happen if problem X is just ignored.
well a few years back they had a member of the press try to hack DEFCON.
there are some things you don't do or YOU DIE.
Did you miss the part where I said I don't begrudge them their decision to leave for greener pastures? Employee loyalty to company is almost entirely dead. Company loyalty to employee is also dead. It's not fair to employers to expect them to be loyal to their employees when those same employees aren't loyal to their employer.
We created an economic system that rewards actions that create profit at the expense of quality of living. And the funny thing is...on average Seagate has worst MTBF (Mean time between failures). The cheapest price (and quality) drives found a way to be cheaper, and the stock market soars.Seagate, the McDonald's of Hard drives.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Looks like the Bobs have been at it again.
The total pretax charges for the plan will be approximately $164 million in fiscal year 2017.
Great going for a company that is approaching 10 billion in revenue.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
One point that should be amplified is that under the Soviet system, there was also a criminal offense called "Social Parasitism" whereby anyone without a job would be a considered to be a criminal, and likely sent to the Gulag. In practice, it was "the hammer" that the authorities used against dissidents - they would be fired from any job they had and blacklisted, then charged with "parasitism" for not working. Additionally, the court system was not independent, and all accused were automatically considered guilty. Indeed, "defense attorneys" often denounced their "clients" even more vigorously than the official prosecutors.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
I'd say the *real* question is will be how reliable will their HD be after they fire 14% of their workforce... of course no one will figure this out for sometime, and they will have made their money by then, at which point it will be some other CEO's problem likely.
Also they probably the only reason they can get away with this is that all the companies have been consolidated in to 4, and they all do the work pretty much in the same geographical location (as we saw as few years ago with that flood and the following profiteering).
The problem is jobs come from consumer buying power ... So yes, it sucks a little when you lose your job
That's a lot of written words, but what's your premise?
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The premise was that jobs come from consumer buying power, not rich people sitting up on high throwing out wages to prop up an endless stream of failing businesses. The money floats to the top; it doesn't trickle down.
From that, you should recognize that there are a limited number of jobs at any given time. No amount of "retraining" will fix that; you're attempting a form of fairness in which we try to hurry up and fit the people who just lost their jobs into the now-available jobs (that only pop up when prices fall and consumers end up with more spending money) before someone who previously lost their job (or just graduated college) manages to steal that spot.
The rest was a discussion about how society's wealth grows by technical progress. I've been told this is Malthusian theory; I'm planning to read Malthus one day. Essentially, the reduction in costs means a reduction in cost-of-living (for a given standard-of-living), meaning there's a new set point of wages (N) that's *lower* than the prior set point of wages (P) such that any wage (w) where P >= w > N represents an increase in standard-of-living. In the real world, you must adjust those values for inflation (an increase in money greater than the increase in production). Thus you're able to hire more people, pay them less, and actually have them all living better-off.
In theory, this means you can raise the minimum wage more slowly than inflation, allowing more of the poorer people to have jobs while simultaneously increasing (and not decreasing) their standard-of-living more slowly than productivity gains. In practice, while that actually holds true, population expands, and continues to expand until it starts creating scarcity (that is, until 10% more population means >10% more labor needed to provide for them, thus the poor start getting poorer). A little of both actually happens, but it's far from the ideal; the optimal situation is also non-ideal.
Everyone wants to satisfy that little pain in their gut that makes them feel sorry for someone. There are millions of invisible someone-else's who we ignore in the process, because they haven't been named, we can't identify with them as anything more than an abstract concept, and so we don't honestly care. The result is we try to establish fairness by harming those someone-else's with impunity in order to stamp out our sad, sorry feelings, hurling unnamed children and hard-working family men into the street because they're not in the group of children and family men we've been made directly aware of.
In some tangential way, allowing the market to fix this particular problem--which only works because the turn-over of skilled workers and, especially, retirees and new college graduates is a hell of a lot bigger than the unemployed labor force--actually harms fewer people in total, because the cost that goes into retraining when you have other people ready to take up those new jobs first is removed from the economy's capability to support total jobs, meaning instead of some amount of food you're producing some amount of retraining, and somebody has to go hungry because they can't afford to eat. We're getting into complex interactions at this point--the kind of things you can identify as harmful (e.g. creating unnecessary things = waste production; training people for jobs we already have people trained for = expending labor to produce training which is not needed = waste), but don't trust anyone to give you a 1:1 graph of X causes Y because that's not happening.
The big, complex problems of the world aren't answered in a half a line of text.
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