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Radio Flyer To Move Wagon Production To China ]RFLY.XX
03/30/2004
Dow Jones News Services
(Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
CHICAGO (AP)--Radio Flyer Inc. (RFLY.XX), maker of the little red wagon loved by generations of children, plans to move manufacturing of its metal wagons to China.
The 87-year-old company said it would keep its headquarters and distribution business in Chicago but decided the Chicago plant where the metal wagons are built is too expensive to maintain. With the plant closing later this year, Radio Flyer will lay off nearly half its 90 employees.
Chief Executive Robert Pasin, whose grandfather started the company, said he didn't believe the move would hurt customer loyalty.
"We're still a Chicago company. We're still a Chicago brand," he said.
Radio Flyer's tricycles, scooters and most of its other products are already made in China. A Wisconsin company makes its plastic wagons and will continue to do so.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
dunno, the poll numbers are still trending down, and the 5dma shows a clear downtrend on GOP:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Presidential_Tracking_Poll.htm
"coffin nail"
lol. only 2.6MM more and back to 0% growth!
70k striking workers added to whatever the number is should get us between 100k and 200k jobs.
don't the striking workers (returning to work) just replace their temp counterparts?
yikes! silver 7.75 and on a tear ....
but futures expire tomorrow, right?
Even if you don't believe that energy is a smaller part of total consumer spending than it was in prior decades, at least you know that gas is cheaper on a constant dollar basis than it has been in the past.
past, perhaps. but i don't think '95-'00. certainly not true for gasoline, since we didn't have a cumulative 100+% inflation over that period. (well, i'm also thinking calif gas prices here, that might be my flaw. i pay 2.50 now.)
sokay ... i don't believe gov statistics anyway
re your extra orders on ib: maybe there's something with your mouse or mouse settings? you seem to get double posts here often, which is often because two clicks are recorded on the 'submit' button ... i think.
marc faber's latest (from FT)
Be braced for a bust as bubbles look set to burst
By Marc Faber
Published: March 29 2004 5:00 / Last Updated: March 29 2004 5:00
Credit has to be given to Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman.
He is the first head of a monetary authority who has not only managed to create a series of bubbles in the domestic economy but has also managed to create bubbles elsewhere - in the New Zealand and Australian dollars, emerging market debts, government bonds, commodities, emerging market equities and capital spending in China.
In fact, over the last 18 months, US monetary policies have boosted all asset classes. This is most unusual since it ought to be obvious that in the long run commodities and real estate inflation is incompatible with a bond bull market.
Mr Greenspan's monetary tribulations mark an achievement no one else in the history of capitalism has accomplished. It is also one investors will never forget once this credit-driven, universal bubble bursts and it will fill entire chapters of financial history books with economic and financial horror stories.
We simply don't know how the end game of the current speculative wave will be played out and when the bust will occur but a painful resolution of the current asset inflation and global imbalances is as certain as night follows day.
I used to believe that sometime in 2004 we would see the beginning of diverging trends in the performance of different asset classes, since bonds, commodities and real estate cannot continuously rally in concert.
After all, one characteristic of a strong secular bull market in one asset class is the simultaneous occurrence of a bear market in another. The commodities bull market of the 1970s was accompanied by a vicious bond bear market. The equities and bond bull markets of the early 1980s were accompanied by a persistent bear market in commodities and, in the 1990s, stocks of developed Western markets soared while Japan and emerging stock markets collapsed.
So, I was leaning towards the view that some assets would continue to increase in value in 2004 while others, such as bonds, would begin to fall by the wayside and enter longer-term bear markets. After further consideration, I am now increasingly concerned that sometime soon "everything" could begin to unravel. When interest rates rise, it is conceivable that bonds, stocks, commodities and real estate will all decline in value at the same time.
In the past I have had the tendency to dismiss the deflationist views of some reputed economists and strategists as unlikely. I now feel the current universal asset inflation and overheated Chinese economy will be followed by a serious bust and asset deflation, which will kill consumption in the US. The only question is when.
I'm at a loss as to when this bust will occur. But given the overbought condition of the US stock market, the extremely high bullish consensus (indicative of market tops in the past), the rising commodity markets and the tendency of markets to defeat central bankers who entertain the same erroneous beliefs that central planners under the socialist ideology had when they thought they could plan the best possible economic outcomes, the bust could come sooner rather than later.
Moreover, we know from the experience of Japan in the late 1980s and Hong Kong in the mid-1990s that consumption booms, driven by asset inflation, end with a colossal bust. That can result from rising interest rates, or because stagnating household incomes no longer support the asset bubble as affordability diminishes, or additional supplies coming to the market and exceeding demand.
So, given that consumption driven by asset inflation is unsustainable in the long run and always ends badly, what should the contrarian investor do?
The least desirable asset in the world is US dollar cash. The investment community can take everything in stride - even a 70 per cent decline in Nasdaq stocks. But interest rates, as low as they are now, compel people to speculate on everything from commodities, homes and bonds to equities.
Therefore, investors in the current speculative environment should be extremely defensive and not be tempted by short-term gains, which could be swiftly erased. Daily moves of 5 per cent in investment markets will become common. Nickel recently fell 8 per cent in a day, copper by 5 per cent, and the euro by 5 per cent within a week. Gold and, especially, silver may offer some protection but, once the current asset inflation bubble ends, they could also be in for a rough time.
Obviously, as I experienced in Asia in the 1990s, it wasn't important to be "asset-rich" before the crisis of 1997 but to be "cash-rich" after the crisis when financial asset values had tumbled by 90 per cent and when incredible bargains across all asset classes were available.
The author is editor and publisher of 'The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report' and author of Tomorrow's Gold
first steps to democracy in iraq!!!
G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: March 29, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 28 — American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the doors after the occupation authorities accused it of printing lies that incited violence.
Thousands of outraged Iraqis protested the closing as an act of American hypocrisy, laying bare the hostility many feel toward the United States a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
[...]
Latest figures from BEA show Energy Goods and Services as Percentage of Total Consumer Spending remains below 5% ... well below where it was all through the 1990s bull market run.
how is this possible? it only seems possible if spending has outpaced energy cost increases since 2000 ....
TJ, LOL. You think those Belgians are telling the truth?
hmmm. i see you're trying to undermine my faith in everything. sigh. i'm too young to be too cynical :-P
nah, i'm a total cynic.
hmm. apparently so.
http://www.belgianfries.com/
that's the last time i trust thomas jefferson.
get them to send u a record of logins to your account ...
hussman has been bullish throughout the entire rally ... (unfavorable valuations, favorable trend uniformity, something like that ...)
"you think that "french fries" were invented by the French"
pommes frites!
[from the web]
The original name for french fries was "potatoes, fried in the French manner". That is how Thomas Jefferson first described the dish. Jefferson introduced french fries to the colonies in the late 1700s.
Your software product management background RE: india may hold some interest for our company. Could you PM me if you can.
get his price and then pm me! a friend from shanghai was just visiting this week and i can get him for you at 1/8 of the cost!
OT, Well, At least most Americans Bathe regularly!
actually, america is probably a bit more obsessed with "body odors" than almost anyplace else on earth. which is good for folks who make a business in deodorants, i suppose. but this is a cultural anomaly. criticizing others for it is sort of like criticizing the french for not speaking english or ethopians for eating with their fingers or ...
Well, the euro doesn't seem to think the japanese will stop supporting the dollar anytime soon. Not yet, anyway. 1.2091 currently on the june futes.
hasn't there been speculation on easing in euro-land because of the recession in germany and other economic weakness there?
if the dollar remains firm i wonder if north american miners can do much.
on the other hand, it seems bullish that both gold and miners have rallied somewhat in the face of a steady dollar. this was the sort of thing i was looking for to get back into some gold positions, which i did a week or so ago. (i forget the date.) but i haven't gone whole hog yet ... i wanna see dan get excited first
Isn't this action by Japan the worst thing that could happen to the US dollar?
actually, i think china unpegging their currency will be worse, since they'll probably have to start selling all those treasuries ...
Don't think so. America still pumps tons of dollars into R&D and continues to lead in the idea generation department.
bah. you're deceiving yourself if you believe this. speaking of eda, look at the number of successful eda companies and startups, look at the numbers started by indian immigrants (say like 1/3 to 1/2) and then ask: why did they start these in the u.s.? as i said, right now you're at an advantage because mature brain power has been drained from these countries in the 80's and 90's. but going forward? why should they remain drones to american companies when they can set up shop for themselves and compete head-to-head?
All I'm saying is may the best team win and if we're not the best team right now, retool to figure out how we can be the best team again. How can we provide a better service at the same or lower costs? I don't have a silver bullet for that but have thought about a few different things.
you can't if labor and living costs are cheaper elsewhere. the only difference is talent and skill, and the u.s. has no monopoly on that. on the contrary, as my dad would point out, american students in engineering have almost never gone on to grad school. that is, unless they can get into one of the top 3 or 5 schools, its always been better to go off and get a job. all of the other grad programs are dominated by indian, chinese and korean students. who now can't get employment in the u.s. we've trained an entire generation of folks who are ready to go back and do what you think they can't do: compete with us on an idea basis.
anyway, i think its a fallacy to think that by outsourcing you're just doing what's natural to improve productivity. sure you're doing that, but you're also training your future competition. think of the early days, and how microsoft ursurped ibm's position. you're locking in your dependence on outsourcing (since you can only lower prices in the future), and its only a question of time before you can't compete with a native competitor.
America still pumps tons of dollars into R&D and continues to lead in the idea generation department.
so why do i say "bah!" here? r&d nowadays includes just play old product development at places like msft. ibm has done some interesting stuff. but look at the death of great r&d centers here in the u.s. like bell labs. even microsoft research has become a retirement community for aging academics who have little left to do other than critique and pontificate.
there's only one place where great new "ideas" are being explored in software now, and thats in the open source community. if there is anything like "great new ideas" anymore: much of what remains is incremental improvement.
Bill Gates took lots of ideas from others and just out-executed everyone else to become the richest man in the world.
well, personally i think msft has done much damage to the software industry, all in the name of preserving its cash cows. surely msft is a triumph of marketing second-rate software.
but i don't see the connection. there are lots of examples of folks from with a company leaving and forming a competing company. in software they often have an advantage because they get to start from a clean code base without all the legacy cruft. say avant! or nvidia and sgi. but what's the logical end to all of this? look at nike or nokia. how many shoes or phones do they actually make themselves?
oops. i've been castigated before for links to wsj which others can't click through. here's the text.
Costco's Dilemma: Be Kind
To Its Workers, or Wall Street?
By ANN ZIMMERMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 26, 2004; Page B1
When it comes to workers, companies can be accused of not paying enough -- or paying too much.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s parsimonious approach to employee compensation has made the world's largest retailer a frequent target of labor unions and even Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who has accused the Bentonville, Ark., chain of failing to offer its employees affordable health-care coverage.
In contrast, rival Costco Wholesale Corp. often is held up as a retailer that does it right, paying well and offering generous benefits.
But Costco's kind-hearted philosophy toward its 100,000 cashiers, shelf-stockers and other workers is drawing criticism from Wall Street. Some analysts and investors contend that the Issaquah, Wash., warehouse-club operator actually is too good to employees, with Costco shareholders suffering as a result.
"From the perspective of investors, Costco's benefits are overly generous," says Bill Dreher, retailing analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. "Public companies need to care for shareholders first. Costco runs its business like it is a private company."
Costco appears to pay a penalty for its largesse to workers. The company's shares trade at about 20 times projected per-share earnings for 2004, compared with about 24 for Wal-Mart. Mr. Dreher says the unusually high wages and benefits contribute to investor concerns that profit margins at Costco aren't as high as they should be.
Costco, which opened its first store in 1983 and now has 432 locations, disputes the contention that it takes care of workers at the expense of investors. "The last thing I want people to believe is that I don't care about the shareholder," says Jim Sinegal, Costco's president and chief executive since 1993, who owns about 3.2 million Costco shares valued at $118 million based on yesterday's price of $36.96, up 52 cents, in 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Market trading. "But I happen to believe that in order to reward the shareholder in the long term, you have to please your customers and workers."
CLOCKING IN
Comparing some workplace statistics from Costco and Wal-Mart
Costco Wal-Mart
Employees covered by company health insurance 82% 48%
Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (Full-time) 3 mos 6 mos
Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (Part-time) 6 mos 2 yrs
Portion of health-care premium paid by company 92% 66.60%
Employees who work part-time 43% 30%
Annual worker turnover rate 24% 50%
Source: the companies
Worker pay, benefits and job quality have been hot topics in the retail industry. While employees in many fields are worried about generally stagnant job growth and spiraling health-care costs, already-meager retail wages also are threatened by retail-pricing pressure, partly fueled by Wal-Mart's growing dominance in toys, electronics, groceries and other categories. Grocery workers in California recently waged a brutal four-month strike to protest health-care cuts that large supermarket chains were imposing to stay competitive with Wal-Mart.
Hourly retail pay grew only 1% in the 12 months ended last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with a 1.7% gain for private-sector jobs overall.
Wal-Mart last year added 99,000 jobs in the U.S., making it the country's biggest job creator, and nearly all those positions pay by the hour. And since Costco and Wal-Mart's larger Sam's Club warehouse chain increasingly are competing head-to-head on everything from turkeys to tires, the companies have to pay close attention to each other.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams says the company's "entire package of wages, benefits and career opportunities is at least as good as that offered by Costco," including bonuses, company-paid life insurance and a discounted Wal-Mart stock-purchase program. Sam's Club has a "cost advantage" over Costco, she adds, because it can "leverage efficiencies" from Wal-Mart in areas such as merchandise sourcing and logistics, keeping basic membership fees a third cheaper than Costco's.
Costco has won a reputation for having the best benefits in retail, a sector where labor costs account for about 80% of a typical company's total expenses. Costco pays starting employees at least $10 an hour, and with regular raises a full-time hourly worker can make $40,000 annually within 3½ years. Cashiers are paid $10.50 to $17.50 an hour.
Wal-Mart doesn't disclose its wage rates, since they vary by location. According to a recent study funded by Wal-Mart, cashiers at its Supercenters in Las Vegas were paid $7.65 to $11.45 an hour. Supercenters are Wal-Mart's discount grocery and general-merchandise stores.
Costco also pays 92% of its employees' health-insurance premiums, much higher than the 80% average at large U.S. companies. Wal-Mart pays two-thirds of health-benefit costs for its workers. Costco's health plan offers a broader range of care than Wal-Mart's does, and part-time Costco workers qualify for coverage in six months, compared with two years for Wal-Mart part-timers.
"From day one, we've run the company with the philosophy that if we pay better than average, provide a salary people can live on, have a positive environment and good benefits, we'll be able to hire better people, they'll stay longer and be more efficient," says Richard Galanti, Costco's chief financial officer.
Costco has several advantages over Wal-Mart that help it extend such unusually generous pay and benefits. Costco has a more-upscale reputation than Sam's Club, helping it attract shoppers with higher incomes. The average Costco store rings up $115 million in annual sales, almost double the Sam's Club average. And Costco, which charges $45 to $100 for yearly memberships, doesn't spend any money on advertising.
Costco says its higher pay boosts loyalty: Its employee turnover rate is 24% a year. Wal-Mart's overall employee turnover rate is 50%, about in line with the retail-industry average. Wal-Mart doesn't break out turnover rates at Sam's Club. High turnover creates added expense for retailers because new workers have to be trained and are not as efficient.
Some critics still aren't convinced that lower turnover is worth what it costs Costco in higher wages and benefits. "Their benefits are amazing, but shareholders get frustrated from a stock perspective," says Emme Kozloff, a retail analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein LLC.
Surging health-care costs have forced Costco to make more aggressive moves to control expenses. Moreover, Costco last year raised employees' contribution to about 8% of their health-care costs, up from 4.5%. It was the company's first rise in employee health premiums in eight years. Mr. Sinegal, the Costco CEO, said the company held off from boosting premiums for as long it could, and didn't give in until after it had lowered its earnings forecast twice last year.
Costco also is looking to employees for ideas that could improve efficiency. One suggestion that Costco implemented at stores was to install pneumatic tubes at check-out areas to speed the movement of cash to a store's back office.
Mr. Galanti says company officials want to boost Costco's pretax income closer to 4% of sales, compared with 3% now and 5% at Wal-Mart, without cutting pay. In its fiscal second quarter ended Feb. 15, Costco's net income rose 25% to $226.8 million, or 48 cents a share. Revenue rose 14% to $11.55 billion.
Some longtime Costco fans say the company should stick to its generous wages and benefits. "Happy employees make for happy customers, which in the long run is ultimately reflected in the share price," says John Bowen, an investment manager in Coronado, Calif., who has held Costco shares for eight years.
oh, and as an example, consider magma's recent purchase of mojave.
http://www.eedesign.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=18201252
mojave was formed by a couple guys from the eda industry who had experience with physical verification from working in various established companies. they get together and with a small team (something like 10 engineers, i think) build the core of a physical verification engine, which they then sell to magma for $40MM. building something like that does require quite a bit of specialized skill, but fortunately these guys all come from the industry where they were trained for doing just that. they don't have to step on patents or copyrights to benefit enormously from years of others' work that went into the design of the original products: knowing what the final product looked like - even from just working on parts of the code - tells them exactly what design decisions were made and which were rejected. so with a few people and in a short time they replicate what took orders of magnitude longer in man-years inside cadence and mentor graphics.
now i'm not saying that these guys themselves could have gone off to india (although they're mostly all indian to begin with) and lopped off a big chunk of business from mentor or cadence. those companies have a lock on the foundaries plus years of "trust". but in that respect, eda software is more the exception than the rule.
Outsourcing - I'm not sure why there's this big push to stop outsourcing and everyone thinks outsourcing is "unpatriotic."
maybe "enlightened self-interest" is a better word. as a software exec yourself, you must recognize the fact that you're pretty much pushing for the extinction of your own job in this country. right now, you're in an okay position, because the best indian talent, and the entrepreneurial engineers, were all pulled here to the u.s in the 90's. the ideas were here, the labor is there. but in the long run, software will be a pretty low-margin business. perhaps unless you have essential patents or it requires some skills that are uncommon. but e.g. once everyone knows what an office suite should look like, or a pdf reader, or a spreadsheet, there's nothing stopping the cheap clones .... the only impediment then is expensive u.s. management, which arguably is both more expensive and less cost-effective than setting up shop in india and hiring a few expensive u.s. software architects as consultants.
it was the same with consumer electronics.
If outsourcing is so good, why don't we outsource the military, hire a bunch of cheap labor, put them in uniforms and send them over to IRAQ to defend us.
actually, there was a report on npr recently saying that we do exactly this ... although they're u.s. companies run by retired military ...
thats a really good point. for years, japanese companies have been supporting employees during lean post-bubble years. but here we get stuff like this:
Costco draws criticism from Wall Street for paying decent wages. One analyst complains that "Costco runs its business like it is a private company." The Teamsters think otherwise, claiming Costco is the only company Wal-Mart fears.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32038
well, i'm the eternal skeptic. like, on that site of yours, "our services" comes up like this for me on mozilla:
4 Advertising & promotional artwork services - camera ready artwork
4 Graphic design packages for print / pre press
4 Design, Layout and Pre-Press for Magazines, Brochures, Directories & Anything you require
4 Promotional gifts - printed with your corporate logo - message
4 e-MC: E Campaigns, banners, e-mailers - e-brochures
4 Internet marketing consultancy
4 Web design / hosting / marketing / banner adds, flash animation
what are the 4's supposed to be?
anyway, whatever works for you. heck, i usually buy generic foods in food stores ... except in a few cases. waffles, for example. orange juice. sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't.
yeah, now that works. it has a coherent elegant look. (my mom is an artist (well, also academic) ... so i pretend to know something about this
that's the sort of thing that *is* going to cost money to design. or if you have the design in mind already, you really need to spell out all of the details before you outsource it to someone to actually build it.
by the way, i had dinner with a friend i haven't seen since the dot.com bubble days. he's taiwanese, but now in shanghai, doing work for american and japanese companies, and using local chinese engineers, plus outsourcing from there ...
his take on the labor market in engineering (programming/middleware, rather than web design) is similar to mine: (1) india is cheap, but its hard to find talented folks anymore (demand greater than supply), plus you need a very detailed spec of what you want done, because they're generally very literal minded. (partly because of education tradition, partly because its hard to find talent.) (2) china is easier to find to good workers, but harder to get creative thought out of them. workers expect to be told what to do, won't criticize or voice objections - even based on technical difficulties that could possibly be foreseen but don't arise until later - and, when he does criticize their work they go into "depressed" mode.
of course, this is a generalization based on his limited experience; but it does fit with the way engineering education in these countries, and what my dad has always said about american/european graduate students versus chinese/indian ones.
anyway, his assessment is: if he was doing a large project that needed the creative input of a large number, he'd rather have american engineers; for cost reasons, though, he's currently outsourcing to bulgaria
truly a labor market without borders.
joe:
One of those 'template' type websites my India source did for less than $300.
well, now we get into tastes, i suppose. but to me: its pointlessly busy, lots of disjoint graphics all moving independently ... and none of it is functional! (no links, except in the menu at the top).
anyway, i don't think it stands up to something like this, for use of flash:
http://www.atlasstoneinc.com/
and even there i'd say that alot of the sliding around is pretty pointless. (i mean, if i went to the site, its to find out about the product, not to watch a movie, or even wait for the links to load.)
or even just flash logos like maybe this:
http://www.blindsandshuttersplus.com/
but maybe it just comes down to taste. for me, i usually don't see these things anyway: i use the mozilla firebird browser, which has a large number of downloadable "extensions". and one i'm always using replaces all flash animations with a big gray box that says "flash - click to play". helps to omit all of those noisy and annoying cpu-intensive flash ads.
It's IB and ONLY IB, that is putting on trades without any help from me. I have no problems elsewhere.
lee, since we're talking about software here, with unknown vulnerabilities (both ib and msft), i'll wax a bit paranoid here:
if the trades it puts on are pretty uniformly losing trades, i'd be suspicious that i'd been hacked. in fact, you do make yourself a pretty good target by posting and discussing your trades/intentions here in real time, at a time when the futures market is pretty thinly traded.
anyway, i'd do a full sweep for bugs, or complete reinstall of the operating system; check with ib folks and see if they can give you a record of all of the logins to your account (in case of identity theft); and be more circumspect about posting your trades here.
oh ---- just a quick check on google (i searched 'trader IB hacker') gives a couple instances of IB accounts being hacked, in one case by identity theft, in another because of unknown security precautions):
Maybe they all end up broke before the show is over.
probably. but this would sure be boring tv. well ... maybe on a par with amateur bowling.
according to cnn money yes ... but they also had release down for last monday as well ...
in fact, cnn also says we're supposed to get michigan sentiment today.
perhaps they're all delayed until after window dressing.
isn't the futures expiration for commodities (gold, silver) coming up here at month end?
Steve Ballmer on Microsoft's internet strategy: 'I want to make sure [you] can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.'
shareholders will cheer: yay.
damn europeans wanna stifle this freedom to innovate ... must be french.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&e=3&u=/ap/20040325/ap_on_hi_te/micro....
and on the subject of microsoft: here's why they say you should buy microsoft office rather than use the free open office (openoffice.org)
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/salesmarketing/opensource/discguides/OpenOffice.pdf
reasons include: microsoft protects you from viruses! laff!
Offshore Outsourcing Will Increase, Poll Finds
By KEN BROWN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 26, 2004
Corporate executives in the U.S. expect to increase the amount of work they outsource to offshore locations despite a growing political backlash, according to a survey of more than 180 companies to be released today.
According to the survey, 86% of the companies polled expect to send more technology jobs overseas in the next 12 months, compared with 32% two years ago. Executives are moving more slowly, however: The survey, conducted by Chicago consulting firm DiamondCluster International Inc., said 63% of executives say they are moving incrementally instead of rapidly, compared with 30% who were taking a cautious approach two years ago.
That said, corporate executives have become more realistic about the savings they can get from outsourcing and increasingly are worried about backlash from the public and their own workers over moving jobs overseas, the survey found.
That contrasts with a similar survey done two years ago, when executives were counting on big savings from outsourcing and when sending white-collar jobs overseas wasn't a hot-button issue.
Companies are "no longer looking at 50%-plus efficiency gains, they're looking at 10% or 20% gains," said Tom Weakland, the managing partner at DiamondCluster who conducted the survey.
DiamondCluster polled executives at 182 companies that either are outsourcing now or plan to do so in the next year. DiamondCluster, which focuses on helping companies use technology effectively, conducted a similar poll in late 2002 and early 2003, finding that expectations have dropped significantly.
"The hopes were so grand," said Scott Thompson, executive vice president for technology solutions at Inovant, an entity controlled by Visa USA that runs the credit-card concern's transaction-processing operations.
Mr. Thompson, who participated in the survey, has shifted about 150 maintenance and support jobs to India in the past few years to free his U.S. employees for more important tasks. He said most people realize the gains from outsourcing aren't as spectacular as once believed. "You're just kind of scaling back everyone's expectations of what's possible now," he said.
That is one reason why the executives believe the growth of outsourcing will slow, even as the backlash rises. The survey said 85% of the executives were concerned about legislation or political pressure against outsourcing, while 84% were worried about backlash from employees. And 62% said they were worried about negative corporate publicity that could be created by outsourcing. Those questions weren't asked in the last survey.
this stands out:
Puts
Exchange Option Volume
AMEX NASDAQ-100 Trust - April 34 (QAVPH) 43774
AMEX NASDAQ-100 Trust - June 33 (QAVRG) 19753
AMEX NASDAQ-100 Trust - April 33 (QAVPG) 11780
AMEX NASDAQ-100 Trust - April 35 (QQQPI) 11318
CBOE NASDAQ-100 Trust - June 33 (QAVRG) 112150
...
ppi tomorrow!
anyone else think this is why golds were up significantly, even though the metal was up only 0.5?
intc support: hmm 23.5 i guess ... although its also well below support here as well, at ~27.2.
zeev's ob for his dow gambit on intc is 24.75-25.5.
anyway, we'll see. looks like dell could be going on a sell here.