BenQ Insolvency in German

September 29th, 2006

BenQ unplugged its support for BenQ-Siemens in German.  The immediate victims are its 3,000 employees in German, while its suppliers like Infineon are also facing stiff stock price declination.  I’ve observed the news from Taiwanese media and USA’s, and found one thing very interesting:  Taiwanese media focus their reports on the failure of BenQ’s strategy, emphasizing branding and channel intead of manufacturing, and K.Y. Lee’s depressed face in the press conference;  U.S. media focus more on the reactions of BenQ-Siemens’ employees, people’s impression towards Siemens, and the impact of 3,000 job cuts in German.

Reuters published an article that compared BenQ Siemens with Sony Ericsson.  One reason it raised was the unsuccessful team integration for BenQ and ex-Siemens team.  It quoted from Bent Wood, a consultant, that “BenQ Mobile’s German executives were exhausted from their trips to Taiwan as BenQ increasingly dominated the management.”  I think his point of view is very interesting.  It makes me recall another claim that US high-tech unemployment rate soars because jobs were taken to India.

How are these two related?  BenQ German’s executives could not handle the situation because they traveled too much and were exhausted.  The U.S. corporates moved jobs to India so that high-tech workers could not find a job in the U.S.  It’s all greedy corporates’ fault and not the people’s.  Let’s start over again from the corporates’ view.  BenQ German’s executives need to travel to Taiwan often because they can’t deal with the situation themselves.  If they were able to deal with the situation, Siemens had no reason to give away this division and reimbursed BenQ for taking over it.  (Boo! That’s mean!)  India’s low cost of operation is just one reason that attacts the U.S. corporates.  Had anyone surveyed the proportion of Indian engineers in the U.S. high-tech companies?  There’s another bold reason that is seldom discussed.  The differences of productivity and performance among individuals are extremely high for both high-tech workers and professional managers.  One programmer can be ten times, even hundred times, more efficient than the other.  Same thing for managers, you see the EPS values of companies right?  Companies in good hands outperforms those who are not in a very exaggerating ratio.

All professional managers or professional high-tech workers live in the Darwinism-capitalism world: the most adaptable survived.  It’s not that important about which geographic region we are or how innocent we are.  It’s more about how competitive we are compared to the rest of the world.

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