Our collective economic migraine is back, and this time it's hammering even the global regions and business sectors that avoided the worst of the 2008 financial meltdown. The electronics sector is already feeling the chill. Companies like NXP, Freescale, Philips, HP, and others in the consumer electronics market have already indicated the third quarter and…
This may be news for the board of directors at {complink 2376|Hewlett-Packard Co.}, but shareholders are feeling too mangled right now to care whether new CEO Meg Whitman is getting $1 or $20 million in annual salary. They just want the mess at HP cleaned up quickly. If they still don't understand this, here's another…
The aura surrounding {complink 379|Apple Inc.} can be overpowering. So overwhelming is the distorted reality surrounding the company even the financial analysts who track it have fallen under its spell. Most of their stock price targets, margin, sales, and net income forecasts for Apple, for example, regularly fall short or overshoot, making them completely unreliable…
When credit is tight, “rent-to-own” programs begin to proliferate, offering consumers everything from furniture to cars for a nominal monthly fee. Start-ups are also having a tough time securing credit, as both banks and potential vendors weigh the risk of backing fledgling businesses. In the UK, British Telecom (BT) is launching a type of rent-to-own…
Industry observers have been saying for a while that one of the advantages of a just-in-time or build-to-order supply chain is the compression between the time a problem is discovered and its resolution. A decade ago, a deficit or excess of inventory in the supply chain could take as long as two quarters to correct;…
Just when you thought a company was on track, another flurry of news forces a pause and raises the obvious question: What's really going on there? The spotlight falls again on {complink 4267|Royal Philips Electronics N.V.} Last week, executives told analysts that they were simultaneously deepening their cost-cutting efforts and reconfirming 2013 financial targets. A…
From my corner of the world, the outlook for the end of the year is weak at best and dismal at worst. Euro-zone nations and the United States are stuck in a financial and economic mess, Japan is still mired in a pattern of lackluster decade-long growth, and recently, oil prices have turned down and…
I'm not sure if I'm ready to say business and politics shouldn't mix — I can't see how to avoid it. But the skirmish over Solyndra LLC’s bankruptcy is all about politics. If it had been more about business, the whole mess could have been avoided. For those of you not following the story, the…
US businesses are sunk in a quagmire, hanging on tightly to their pots of gold even as it becomes clear that what the economy needs is companies willing to bet portions of their cash on developing, manufacturing, and selling the next “must-have” products. In a
Investors once again turned up the heat on BlackBerry maker {complink 4644|Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM)}, last week demanding that some tough strategic alternatives be considered. This week, we'll see if and how company officials respond to these requests or, more likely, how they talk around what's becoming a headline news grabber: RIM's viability. A…