Archive for March, 2005

Samsung Electronics

Published
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ron
on March 31, 2005
in Emerging Markets
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samsung_electronicsAccording to Interbrand<, a consultancy, Samsung has moved quickly and spectacularly from a typical OEM to manufacturing high-tech products, focusing on design and consumer growth. Samsung’s mission is to associate its brand in consumers’ minds with products that are beautiful, avant-garde and user-friendly.

In the past five years, Samsung has rebounded from the Asian financial crisis that devastated South Korea to emerge as a consumer-electronics giant with one of the world’s most-admired brands. As its mobile phones, LCD televisions and other consumer devices have grown increasingly popular, the Samsung name has simultaneously managed to make young consumers feel cool and leave executives of its rivals-even at giants like Sony-quaking with fear.

More on the Interbrand’s profile of Samsung can be found here.

Broadband growth boosts China Telecom profit

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ron
on March 31, 2005
in Emerging Markets
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china_telecomChina Telecom Corp. Ltd., Chinas largest fixed-line phone company, reported better-than’-expected profits for 2004 on Thursday thanks to growth in its broadband business, which it expects to remain a driver amid market expectations for an industry overhaul.

China has 320 million fixed-line users and 344 million mobile users — one customer account for half its 1.3 billion population.

Dell’s Corporate Culture

Published
by
ron
on March 30, 2005
in International Business
. 1 Comment

dell-logo
Today I was reading upon an interview with Michael Dell, founder and chairman and Kevin Rollins currently ceo of the conglomerate. What catches my eye was the part about the corporate culture of Dell! The secret of Dell’s success goes beyond its famous business model. High expectation and disciplined, consistent execution are embedded in the company’s DNA. Currently the company employs 53.000 people and operates in more than 80 countries.

Hereafter, I will cite some quotes from the interview.

The mind set.
Many companies like to talk about investing for the future. We say the future is today and tonight. Good execution requires a sense of urgency. The notion of investing for the future can become a trap. However, the point is, we don’t tolerate businesses that don’t make money.

On General Managers and Culture.
We’ve had a no-excuses culture from the beginning. Whenever we hear that a business might have to lose money for a while, we challenge the General Manager (GM) to figure out how to run the business better than anyone ever has and not lose money. If you say, “No, we’re going to make this business profitable”, good things happen. I’m not saying we’re the only real men in the world, but we set expectations very high.

And we’re pretty hard on people who miss-not just the two of us but the whole company. When you fail to execute, our culture says, “Fix it. Find what’s wrong, and fix it. Or ask for help”.

We train employees to constantly ask themselves: “How do we grow faster? How do we lower our cost structure? How do we improve service for customers?”

It’s really though to be a GM at Dell. To succeed as a GM here, you have to be smart and you have to be though. You have to be a team player, and you have to understand the P&L.

Breakthroughs.
The fact of the matter is our general managers have succeeded time and time again. When we hold somewhat irrational expectations and convince them they can do it, they come up with fantastic breakthroughs.

New Leaders.
We used to just throw people in the deep end and see if they’d sink or swim. If they couldn’t swim, we’d get someone else. Part of the problem was we were hiring the wrong people-people who weren’t going to be able to swim at Dell. Our promotes to VP and director have shifted from about 75% outside hires and 25% promotes from within to about 30% outside and 70% within. We now understand this yields better results. You know they’ve already got the DNA.

So we now give a lot of swimming lessons. But if you still can’t swim after the lessons, then this is going to feel like a tough place to work.

The 21st-Century Supply Chain

Published
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ron
on March 29, 2005
in Global Strategy and International Business
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supply-chain

Building Deep Supplier Relationships
Two Japanese automakers have had stunning success building relationships with North American suppliers – often the same companies that have contentious dealings with Detroit’s Big Three. What are Toyota and Honda doing right?

The Supplier-Partnering Hierarchy

Conduct joint improvement activities.

  • Exchange best practices with suppliers.
  • Initiate kaizen projects at suppliers’ facilities.
  • Set up supplier study groups

Share information intensively but selectively.

  • Set specific times, places, and agendas for meetings.
  • Use rigid formats for sharing information.
  • Insist on accurate data collection.
  • Share information in a structutred fashion.

Develop suppliers’ technical capabilities.

  • Build suppliers’ problem-solving skills.
  • Develop a common lexicon.
  • Hone core suppliers’ innovation capabilities.

Supervise your suppliers.

  • Send monthly report cards to core suppliers.
  • Provide immediate and constant feedback.
  • Get senior managers involved in solving problems.

Turn supplier rivalry into opportunity.

  • Source each component from two or three vendors.
  • Create compatible production philosophies and systems.
  • Set up joint ventures with existing suppliers to transfer knowledge and maintain control.

Understand how your suppliers work.

  • Learn about suppliers’ business.
  • Go see how suppliers work.
  • Respect suppliers’ capabilities.
  • Commit to coprosperity.

21st Century Supply Chain 1

21st Century Supply Chain

21st Century Supply Chain

What’s Next for Apple? – The Next Apple gear?

Published
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ron
on March 28, 2005
in High Tech & Media
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Apple Logo
Apple’s lead in digital music is growing even as an army of corporate powerhouses – Dell, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony among them – spends hundreds of millions of dollars to grab a slice of the business. And the financial transformation driven by Apple’s storming of the music stage has been profound: On its knees when Steve Jobs (chairman) retook control in 1997, Apple is coming off a year in which revenue rose 33 percent and profits quadrupled. Its stock, not surprisingly, has been on a tear, up more than sixfold in the past two years and now hovering around $42 a share.

It has become a parlor game in some quarters to try to divine where Apple is going and how it intends to get there – and not just at the dozens of blogs that traffic in Apple rumors. Recently, Microsoft quietly hired a former Apple design executive whose mission is to help Bill Gates’s baby behave more like Steve Jobs’s. Business 2.0 has lay-down some interesting future designs of Apple products which are listed below, to make sure this are not offical announced future Apple products.

PODWATCH
A wrist-worn iPod would keep time and play music, using Bluetooth to wirelessly beam tunes to earbuds or headphones.
PodWatch

WIRELESS iPOD
A portable player would utilize Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and enable users to remotely connect to the iTunes store or the music kept on their computers. The dark color distinguishes it from today’s iPods, which require wired connections to download or listen to songs.
Wireless iPod

vPOD
A digital image/iPod combo would feature a camera for still photos and video and would wirelessly sync with iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. A low-power color screen would serve as a viewfinder when the vPod is closed and as a larger display when it’s open.
vPod

iHOME
This Wi-Fi-based home network and media server would be the ultimate digital appliance, managing everything from music and photos to TV recording and office tasks. Shown here are the system’s hub, an IP handset for Web-based calls, an iSight device for videoconferencing, and a single iRemote to control it all.
iHome

iPHONE
A simplified wireless phone married to an iPod would feature Apple’s signature scroll wheel for navigation and a slide-out keypad.
iPhone

In many ways, for the first time in more than a decade, Apple has a chance to become a commercially powerful company – not just a very cool place with a superstar CEO and brilliant designers, but a leader in new markets that are exponentially bigger than the very computer industry it pioneered.

Only Sony?

Published
by
ron
on March 27, 2005
in International Business
. 1 Comment

Sony Japan
On March 8th this month, Sony replaced Mr Idei’s and appointed the first non-Japanese chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer to run the media and electronics conglomerate. Suprisingly, but really interesting cos an outsider, an American will run the Japanese conglomerate.

Sony operates in a dizzying array of consumer-electronics segments, and so must fend off challenges from competitors across the technology spectrum. Samsung, a once-inferior South Korean rival, has embarrassed Sony by leaping ahead in flat-panel televisions. Apple’s iPod digital music players have become the Walkmans of the early 21st century. Sony’s digital cameras are among the best, but prices have been dropping and two long-standing rivals, Canon and Nikon, have regained their edge as digital photography has matured. And in game devices, an area where Sony still thrives, the next version of its PlayStation will face a much stiffer challenge from rival Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox.

Moreover, in the past Sony concluded that the best way to promote the adoption of its technologies was to get into the content business, since content owners have a big influence over which technology standards live or die. Hence its unique corporate combination of consumer electronics and content. But is the resulting hybrid a Frankenstein, or a new breed? That is the urgent question facing Sony’s new boss, Sir Howard Stringer.

Today, I was reading an article upon the Financial Times and it informed on the following. Sony is considering spinning off some businesses as part of a review to simplify the electronics and entertainment group’s complex structure, according to Ryoji Chubachi, Sony’s incoming president.

Would Sir Howard Stringer turnaround the company and return to focus on Sony’s core business “making electronics”, and spin-off the media business? As in the old-days would it be again “Only Sony”? We will know over the upcoming weeks/months it will be interesting to watch closely!

Reasons to return

Published
by
ron
on March 25, 2005
in Personal
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Chicago Millennium Park
In the year 2003 I was visiting Chicago for my first time. Besides the wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and meeting up with all my friends I was dazzled by the city itself. It had a similar magnitude as New York City and moreover Chicago is less chaotic, tons of entertainment, more structured and Chicagoans are really friendly, welcome in the Mid-West. :) Besides that, Chicago emphasised that skyscrapers can be architectonic. Despite others, however, people might say something different on my comparison between NYC and Chicago. Nowadays, Chicago has a new attraction, Millennium Park, and it might be the drop to return to Chicago within a short timeframe.

First planned in 1998 as a way to create new parkland in Grant Park and transform unsightly railroad tracks and parking lots, Millennium Park has evolved into the most significant millennium project in the world.

Located in downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets, the 24.5-acre park is an unprecedented centre for world-class art, music, architecture and landscape design, where you can experience everything from interactive public art and ice skating to al fresco dining and free classical music presentations by the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus. Among the park’s prominent features are the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the most sophisticated outdoor concert venue of its kind in the United States; the interactive Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; the contemporary Lurie Garden designed by the team of Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel; and Anish Kapoor’s hugely popular Cloud Gate sculpture.

Alright, even better, a good friend is living right around the corner of the Millennium Park!

Millennium Park Brochure

Onshoring (Bay Area, California)

Published
by
ron
on March 25, 2005
in High Tech & Media
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Onshoring
According to conducted research by McKinsey, a consultancy, the decision to offshore is hardly clear cut.

Roughly two-thirds of California’s 1.5 million manufacturing jobs are in customer-service-intensive and capital-intensive industries such as electronics, fashion apparel, and plastics, where the benefits of a short, responsive local supply chain can outweigh higher domestic wages. The advantages of staying onshore are greatest for a company with products that are not labour intensive, have short life cycles and high obsolescence costs, and target very time-sensitive customers.

Source

Keep downloading folks!

Published
by
ron
on March 24, 2005
in High Tech & Media and Personal
. 0 Comments

Downloading Folks

The Next Generation Mobile Phones

Published
by
ron
on March 24, 2005
in Global Strategy
. 1 Comment

Next Generation Mobile Phones

Last month, Samsung has launched a new phone, the sph-A800, that uses its built-in two-megapixel camera as a business-card scanner. You take a photo of a business card, and optical character recognition (OCR) software scans the image for text which you can then insert into the relevant fields of a new address-book entry.

The Japanese arm of Amazon, an online retailer, offers a service that allows subscribers to carry out a cheeky price check while browsing a bookstore. Snap a picture of the bar-code on a book or CD, and a quick over-the-air look-up will tell you if Amazon’s price is lower. Japanese consumers can even use the technology to find out how fresh their fish is. Scan the bar-code on its packaging, and a text message arrives in seconds detailing when it was caught, on which boat, and even the name of the fisherman who reeled it in.

The next step is to enable phones to read two-dimensional bar-codes, which are small squares containing an assortment of black and white dots. Although an unfamiliar sight in most countries, such bar-codes are already quite common in Japan, where they are known as quick-response (QR) codes. Many people have QR-codes on business cards, says Mr Fasol, so that their contact details can be quickly uploaded to a phone. Other applications include buying tickets for a concert or listening to a sample song on a CD, just by scanning the QR-code on a poster or a CD case. A code can contain an internet address, and scanning it prompts the phone to load the relevant page. The same technology is being promoted in America by firms such as Scan-buy, in New York, and NeoMediaTechnologies, in Fort Myers, Florida.

Moreover, when travellers scan the code, software on their phones interprets it and calls up a web page providing up-to-the-minute information about when the next bus will arrive. There is no need to key in a fiddly internet address. Semacode has also teamed up with Qwest, an American telecoms firm, to run a series of virtual treasure hunts. Hundreds of children rampage through a city centre in teams, hunting for Semacodes and claiming them by taking snapshots of them.