I'm sure...
..he'll just send out some ranting tweet in response.
The rest of the government will then clear up the shit after him.
Are you listening, Mr Trump? World's largest tech distie is now owned by the Chinese
The world's largest tech distributor is now privately owned by the Chinese: shipping titan Tianjin Tianhai has coughed a whopping $6bn to take over US-based Ingram Micro. The transaction, made public in February, was held up earlier in the year after the Shanghai Stock Exchange sought answers over financial implications for …
-
-
Thursday 8th December 2016 02:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm sure...
Despite being paid a lot less than Americans on average, the Chinese have the surplus wealth to buy up western companies. So if Trump's going to make America great again, he'll have to make the US competitive with cheap Chinese labour by lowering the cost of living to a comparable level. Call it "equality" with China to sell it to liberals.
First off, make the US 1 million+ prison population work for their upkeep. Prisons need to become self-funding industries to eliminate costs to the taxpayer and make a large low-cost labour force available to industry. Imagine if iPhones were assembled inside US prisons.
Secondly, provide tax breaks to industries who build new accommodation for their workers. Westerners waste a large portion of their incomes competing for limited housing stock. If housing costs could be slashed, the cost of living would fall significantly, freeing up money to be invested in buying up Chinese companies instead. There needs to be long term planning to match housing capacity with employment to prevent housing bubbles (which are a waste of hard earned money).
Plan to shift more people from service industry into productive industries. Service jobs cycle money around the economy but don't increase the wealth of the nation. Workers need to be freed up to produce things, even if the profit per worker is negligible it will counter the need for imported goods and increase the overall wealth of the nation.
Use incentives (+ disincentives) to get Americans to switch from studying academic subjects that don't equip people for wealth-creating work. America ought to be able to educate it's own population to do these jobs, rather than relying on continually importing workers. Reduce the demand for non-productive leeching sectors of the economy such as lawyers by using taxation to discourage litigation etc.
The defence industry needs to be prioritized to get maximum return for the tax payer rather than shareholders. Inefficient procurement and operation needs to be reviewed.
-
Thursday 8th December 2016 23:13 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: AC Re: I'm sure...
"....Westerners waste a large portion of their incomes competing for limited housing stock....." True, but the problem is a lot of voters would see it as losing money if their house price went down, so they will punish at the polls any party that promises to drive down the price of housing. I don't think it is as bad in the US, but in the UK I know many professionals whose only form of savings is the equity in their over-priced homes.
".....Imagine if iPhones were assembled inside US prisons...." Imagine the poor quality of product that would be likely to result! Workers have a vested interest in meeting quality levels as they need their wages, but prisoners don't face the same pressure. What are you going to do, add a few years to their sentences if they don't perform as required? I'd love to see you get that past the ACLU!
".....Use incentives (+ disincentives) to get Americans to switch from studying academic subjects that don't equip people for wealth-creating work. America ought to be able to educate it's own population to do these jobs, rather than relying on continually importing workers....." There are two problems with that. Firstly, TBH, the "skills shortage" is largely a myth, IMHO. What employers mean is they have a shortage of cheap skilled workers, and schemes like the H1B visas allow them to employ foreign talent at a fraction of the cost of an experienced local. As an example, I worked on a project where over 20 Indians were employed as they were happy to take $18/hr when the cheapest equivalent US coders wanted $60/hr. There wasn't a shortage of local coders, it was just a lot cheaper to use foreigners. Secondly, governments are very slow and very bad at predicting market demand for particular skillsets. I remember seeing one UK scheme only a few years ago to teach the unemployed C when the market had long since switched focus to Java and C#. If your target is the "liberal arts", then the market already sifts that chaff from the wheat anyway.
".....The defence industry needs to be prioritized to get maximum return for the tax payer rather than shareholders...." The problem there is the defence industry is not a cheap business, it involves a lot of up-front costs, especially research, and without generous contracts there would be a mass exodus from the market to fields with better and easier profits. Why struggle for years to make one specialised vehicle for a limited government order, when you can switch to making ordinary vehicles for the public at much less cost and much higher returns? Look how many independent warplane manufacturers we had in the Thirties and Forties, now compare to today, when developing a combat airplane takes four times as long, costs over a hundred times as much, and involves all types of specialised research not even dreamt of seventy years ago! In the UK we used to have several major aircraft engines makers alone, such as Napier, Bristol and Rolls Royce, plus a host of smaller ones such as Alvis, Armstrong-Siddely and Blackburn, whereas today, with the greater associated costs, it's pretty much RR alone. Governments have to strike a balance between bang-for-the-taxpayers'-buck and not killing their defence industry, otherwise they will be left with no choice but to buy from abroad and therefore lag behind countries still developing their own kit.
-
-
Wednesday 7th December 2016 18:06 GMT Matt Bryant
Why the cloud will kill Ingram Micro long before any Trump tariffs.
From what I see, Ingram Micro is (and a lot of resellers are) failing by the IBM model of attached services - pile the enterprise tin high, sell it cheap, and hope to profit on selling software and consulting services attached to the tin deal. That was great when businesses did the majority of their IT in-house. For the majority of businesses, IT was something they had to pay for to do what really mattered to the business (e.g., operating as a bank), so they were willing to pay for someone else to do the bits their own IT departments couldn't, such as installing the kit and building it into a working production environment. The problem is the cloud companies like Azure and AWS don't need to buy those services, they are IT service companies in their own right. If a business using the cloud wants a new instance added to their SAP environment, they no longer need to take months to build a datacenter, fill it with servers, storage and networking kit, build up the platform and then create the SAP instance, they simply call SAP and place an order and SAP does it in their cloud. So the majority of those enterprise software and services consulting gigs and the revenues they generate are dying, leaving distributors like Ingram Micro chasing lower profit revenue streams such as laptops and printers. What's left is a lot of big warehouses and a logistics chain that doesn't really offer anything much over UPS.
-
Thursday 8th December 2016 20:24 GMT Gis Bun
Add Softbank who claims it will add 50,000 jobs in the US [at least not burger flippers] and Foxconn exploring to build gadgets in the US. We'll see if either follow through. Foxconn has a history of not doing what they say.
Meanwhile I wonder how many tax incentives it will cost the government.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
