(note this was written 5th July and updated 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 15th July... so far ;-)
A few PCBs arrived for dumping about a month or two ago. Due to me working 6
days a week for the entire year and 7 days a week for the last 3 months as the
company I worked for panicked to get work out the door due to a planned closure,
I didn't have time to deal with them. But I have plenty of time now because I'm
retired since 1st July 2015. In case you are wondering, I'm 47 ^_^
Sadly the great company I worked for from 1990-2005 was bought by a large
Swedish corporation named Sandvik in 2005, paying a whopping $106 Million for it.
That figure is amazing because they don't even own the building or land, they really only bought intellectual property and equipment. The previous owner leased the land and building to them at a rate of $70,000 a month.... a total of $8.4 Million over the 10 years and he still owns it! He's certainly one smart cookie ;-)
If I had paid $106M for a company I would have wanted the land and building too, or I would have walked away. Not so with Sandvik they have shit for brains and money to burn.
As with most large corporations they
are run by morons who are paid millions and don't have a clue, the result being
a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 10 years in a downward
spiral. This is particularly prevalent in countries like Australia where
management think they are more important than workers..... not so my friend.....
you can pay managers millions but without workers you have no product and no
profit, therefore no company and thus you are sitting behind a desk pushing a
pen with no purpose. This is even more important for a technical engineering company. Without
quality skilled workers in key positions you have major mistakes being made
across the board in many critical areas time and time again..... but no, they
hire losers in every sector of the company and pay the management millions and
hope it all works out for the best.
So after 10 years of making mistake after mistake after mistake and generating
less profits than they wanted (which they tell us is because of having to pay
high wages to workers, thus the cost of production is too high in their
opinion... in reality wages are only 5-10% of expenditure), someone in Sweden
got a "brilliant" idea to close up this company and 25 other companies world-wide
over the next 5 years and move all manufacturing to India and China (which
costs $100 million per factory to build and set-up). Hold on a second. Brilliant
Idea? I think not. A company making mistake after mistake and now all of a
sudden they make a good decision? Again, I think not. This is just another big
mistake. And yes that's right, I said 25 companies world-wide will close. That
gives you an idea just how clueless Sandvik is when they have to close 25
factories worth 100 million each just to save their asses. The correct thing to
do is hire quality people who know how to run a company in profit and put them
into key positions and actually "fix" the problems. Then get other people on
board at the production level to streamline production and processes. Of course
this requires skilled people, of which Sandvik have very few. One of Toyota's
core principles is constant improvement and respect to all employees. This is a
great way to run a company and is known as 'The Toyota Way'. This would surely
involve quality people who know what they are doing. Quality people with key
attributes like qualifications, experience, knowledge, dedication and
discipline. In my 25 years of working I never met anyone who had all 5
qualities. Here there is zero improvement because they only hire lazy assholes
who do as little as possible (and I'm not just talking about the production
workers) and there's zero respect for the workers, primarily because they
believe they are more important. Instead they screw everyone and just close it
and walk away. With idiots like that in charge it's amazing they lasted 150
years, but keep an eye on the major news sites because I'm sure it will get
worse.
Aside from that, Sandvik subsidiaries include entities set up in Ireland that
have no home country for tax purposes and all products are invoiced to 'Sandvik
Ireland'..... meaning abuse of the Australian Taxation System and avoidance of
the GST or at least minimizing the amount of tax payable. Since they are already
saving millions in taxes the 5-10% of expenditure paid as wages to employees is
not a great burden on the company and giving the reason to close because of that
is in fact a gross untruth. The real reason is of course, intellectual
shortsightedness caused by greed and the lack of the 5 key attributes mentioned
above.
It's sad in a couple of ways. One because they just trashed everything in the
bin and walked away (instant ~$60 million loss) and secondly because this kind
of business practice is not illegal. Corporations should be made accountable for
their mistakes.... or in the case of Sandvik, 1000's of mistakes costing 100's
of millions. If I had my way all of them would be shot, although thinking about
it that's probably a waste of a lot of good bullets. Maybe I could line a few up
together and get them all with one bullet in an optimized process to save time
and money (something Sandvik have no idea about). But hey that's an improvement.
And if more losers are lined up on some kind of production line it could even be
considered constant improvement! Thus we have harmony because we are doing it
'The Toyota Way'!
It was actually pretty funny watching those myopic morons trip up over their
asses time and time again. As a master in my field I told them so many times
what to do and they just ignored my advice and did it their way. Or they asked
what I thought about something 3 months after they already spent several million
on it. I just laughed and told them they were on their own. It was 10 years of
great entertainment.
So you might have a few questions......
1. Why are they closing now?
Sandvik bought the company purely to obtain
products and patents. They had no intention of staying longer than necessary. I
believe this closure was planned many years ago. Possibly even 10 years ago.
2. Why give us 1 year notice?
Because in general Sandvik don't have quality
people working for them so things take a long time to happen. Most people
employed by Sandvik are low skilled because they can pay them less. Another
reason is because they pay low rates they can't attract quality people so they
scrape the bottom of the barrel and take whatever sticks. As such, Sandvik needs
a lot of time to get things going. Even the people doing the planning are losers
so the result is zero planning and it takes years before things are running
well. Last I heard Sandvik India and China were in VERY serious trouble with
production and running way behind schedule, even after being given 1 year to get
production running. Hence the reason why all of us here were working 6 or 7 days
a week making stock which will be shipped to China/India to cover their asses.
Most, if not all of that is caused by losers in charge and losers doing the
work. If they absolutely had to close down and were smart they would have given
us 2 or 3 years notice. But well, they're just not. And like I always say, if
you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
3. Why move to China/India?
Their primary reason for the move to 3rd world
countries is purely so Sandvik can avoid having to pay company taxes to the
government. With around $2.5 million a month in sales you can imagine how much
tax would need to be paid. That figure is actually very funny because this
company is bigger than the previous company they bought and previously was doing
around $4 million a month every month. It puzzles me how a larger company with
more employees and more production capacity can produce less in sales. Obviously
the losers in charge are wasting millions somewhere, production output is
actually lower because they only hire losers and clearly people at the top are
being paid way too much.... and what's funnier is that Commodore back in the
80's and mid 90's (after Jack Tramiel left) did exactly the same thing and died
because of it, and it's all documented in the book "On The Edge: The Spectacular
Rise and Fall of Commodore". Pity the morons in charge here didn't read it, they
could have avoided the same mistakes.
Their secondary reason is to avoid
paying high wages to employees (this country has a high standard of living with
only around 6% unemployment). They really don't care how cheap and nasty the
product is because the products are designed very poorly (again, by losers) and
don't last a long time anyway. And they don't care how much scrap is made or how
long it takes because they pay their employees the equivalent of a bowl of rice
a day.
Speaking of rice, you might not realize this, but in China/India companies are required to provide on-site
meals to employees. That cost has to be paid by the company, including providing a room, tables/chairs, cooks/servants and food, and cleaning up afterwards. In Australia no such thing happens. The employee provides his/her own food and eats it in their own time (employees attend work an extra half-hour to cover that because most companies don't pay for the meal breaks). Another thing you may not realize is there was an agreement where the employees here would do two jobs at the same time (essentially operate two machines at the same time.... quite easy because they are fully-automatic specialized computer controlled CNC's) and because of that the pay rates were adjusted ever-so-slightly higher than average, but the company is effectively getting more output for their money (at least in theory if skilled and dedicated workers were doing the work in an efficient manner). In China/India the workers absolutely refuse to do two jobs at the same time and/or operate two machines at the same time (and their unions will get involved if they are told to do so) and their pay rates are about half (on average) of the western-world's rate (hence the reason for doing only one job) so the company is actually getting less for it's money. Think about it.... one person operating two machines for a rate (with no additional burden to the company), or one person operating one machine for half that rate AND the company has to provide meals too. It's hilarious to think the company thinks it's a wise decision to move there in the first place but looking now at the real costs makes it clear it's a bad decision. By moving to China/India they have actually achieved nothing except a phenomenal waste of millions of dollars by dropping everything here and putting extra pressure on China/India to produce the items that were being produced here, which they have failed to do because the time frame required to get up to speed and take over that work is longer than 1 year. Of course it's no big surprise it's a major stuff-up because they've been doing that here since they bought the company in 2005.
Eventually those countries will get better and pay rates will equal the
wealthier countries then companies like Sandvik will likely go back to those
wealthier countries so production becomes more cost effective (i.e. better
workers and faster production with less scrap equals lower costs). Unfortunately
that is some way off, probably 30-50 years from now. So China/India, get it
while you can because one day it will be all over, rover.
Some major manufacturing companies such as those in the USA and Germany have already seen
the light (USA less than 5 years ago and Germany more than 10 years ago) and
have moved back to their own countries because not only are they screwing their
own country's economy by producing overseas but they are not doing themselves
any favors by making cheap crap in China that doesn't last it's useful life. You
only need to look at Apple products to see that cheaply produced is not better.
Although in the case of Apple cheaply produced and cheaply sold are mutually
exclusive ;-)
I should write a book about it. Maybe I'll call it 'How not to run a company'.
Oh, erm, I think I just did hahaha!
Anyway I don't need to work so I decided to just say 'fuck-it' and catch up on
sleep and hobbies, including of course, dumping! :- D
On with the
show!
