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Panasonic cuts 17,000 jobs, blames Japan quake for revenue loss | VentureBeat

 

I don’t understand …Panasonic reported a $499 million loss for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011

 

I don't understand this also since it's not even the fourth quarter yet of fiscal year 2011? 17,000 jobs? I find this hard to believe based on the global market that thrives on not only the Toughbook, but Panasonic in general.....

 

News & Events | Panasonic Global


I would look at this....

 

Check Panasonic's Fiscal 2011 Financial Results page.

From the release:

Also, in the supplemental financial data document, note that the number of total employees dropped from 384,586 at the end of March 2010 to 366,937 at the end of March 2011.

 

A couple of points:
1. A companies "Fiscal Year" is whenever it decides it is. It has no relation to the calendar.
2. Panasonic is reducing it's work force by around 4.8 percent over the next year.
It is very difficult for a layman to read anything significant into this data. There is no question that Japanese industries have taken a huge hit from the earthquake/tsunami. Toyota anticipates at least a year before they will start to get back up to speed. Panasonic may have taken a similar hit, and decided to lay off some help at affected factories.
Finally, if you don't think we will be digging out of the Bush Era/Wall Street/Big Bank debacle for a long time to come, think again. There are still a few shoes left to drop. The Global Economy really was on the edge of the cliff, and Washington at least seems to be more worried about birth certificates than any serious attempts to reign in the madness in the financial markets. The economy is not good just because the stock market went up.
CAP

 

Amen..I am glad to see at least one other person is aware of the reality of the Bush Era/Wall Street/Big Bank debacle. If anyone thinks it is over, look at oil/gasoline prices. It's not over folks. They just moved to another commodity. We have an excess of oil at the moment. No shortage! Yet prices skyrocket because the speculators can make a huge profit off Joe Public. It is almost offensive that the president appointed someone to "look into" oil prices. Any economist, who isn't financially involved in oil, will tell you the speculators have been driving up the prices. It's been this way since the Bush era. Yet we will "look into" it rather than actually do something.
I wonder who owns the majority of our gov't? Is it oil or drug companies?
The best gov't money can buy! Ugh...it makes me sick. Worse of all is the PATHETIC number of people who actually vote. All we have to do is vote for someone new every time we vote. It would change gov't attitude right away.


Stepping off of the soapbox now.

 

To keep it short and simple - surely this is the result of living in the land of the free? People/companies are free to buy and sell as they like. The price of oil & petrol going up is just market forces at work, which is the result of a free market economy.

The way around this is to:
a) Use public transport/your bike more
b) Get an electric car. Yes they do exist now and are reasonable.
c) Don't travel as much.

 

My opinion...It's the result of huge amounts of money needed to get elected into office, specifically congress. Once elected it's almost as if you get elected for life. When they do get voted out, the retirement package is unbelievable. Joe Average voter usually votes figuring that whoever is in is better than the unknown. Unknown because most voters are too lazy to research the candidates. Worried about birth certificates rather than ideals.
Or they are swayed by the media ads which have turned into nothing more than broadcast lies. Big money wins so big money gets the votes. Nobody votes against the hand that feeds them.
I suppose market forces are what caused the global economic crash also???
Greed caused it, and greed is what runs the speculators. Sadly we need laws to protect the entire country from the very greedy minority. Land of the free is one thing, but people are so greed driven and short sighted to not see the economic disaster that looms from their actions.
If anyone thinks the oil situation/ speculators can be ignored, wait and see what happens economically in this country with gas at $5 or $6 a gallon. This so called recession(depression) that we are coming out of will be back bigger than ever.
I believe in free enterprise and free market economy, and that is my point exactly, the market for gasoline is DOWN and supply is HIGH yet price goes up????????
We as a country and gov't will ignore it until it threatens our national economy or security, which the way things are going, it will in the near future.
My income is low. I walk to the grocery store and have not gone on vacation in years. I only drive when necessary, such as to work or shopping that can not be done in my home town. I can barely keep my 14year old truck running let alone buy a new vehicle. I can not afford health care that I need for a major medical condition I have. I plug along and I will continue plugging only by the Grace of God.

 

Econ 101: Oil price is a function of supply and demand.

Commodity trading 101: Supply kicks demand in the taco when it comes to impact on price.

Solution: Drill baby drill.

 

The United States sits on less than 2% of the world's known oil reserves. The oil companies have drilled on less than half of the oil leases they currently get paid to steal from the citizens of the USA. If they drilled ALL of our known reserves tomorrow, the production would be a fraction of our daily consumption and wouldn't come on line for 5 to 10 years. Econ 101 might work if the game wasn't rigged, it is rigged. "Drill baby drill" is right up there with "trickle down", and "the rich need all their money to create jobs" in the codswallop sweepstakes.
CAP

 

When most of the oil comes from the middle east, then there's not much you can do about it controlling the supply chain.

 

ANWAR, Alaska is 220 million acres in size. The oil companies want 20 million acres of the part that is barren tundra with no animals or plant life. Drilling there with small footprints would produce 100% of the U.S. oil needs for the next 20 years while we work on developing AFFORDABLE alternative energy.

Food for thought:
-1 acre of energy from oil= 14 acres of energy from wind mills
-1 acre of energy from oil= 7 acres of energy solar panels
-golf courses destroy hundreds acres of pristine animal habitat
-presently, one unit of hydrogen fuel takes an equal amount of electricity
to separate hydrogen from water. Net benefit equals zero.
-Presently, the only type of fuels that have enough energy to power
an 18-wheeler truck is gasoline, diesel fuel, or natural gas.

 

Agreed. Higher taxes are needed. Punish success and reward failure I say! From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, yes? In 5-10 years we'll all be driving wind powered cars so who cares. Ignore domestic supply! Redistribute baby redistribute! Fair is fair. Did I miss anything?

 

Green Car Congress: Jaguar Introduces C-X75 Gas Micro-turbine Extended Range Electric Vehicle Concept

 

Congratulations on being one of the top 4% of earners in the USA who isn't getting screwed by the continuation of the Bush tax cuts.
CAP

 

What are you all complaining, in Belgium we pay 45 to 50 % on taxes
Fuel is 2 $/liter (70% tax)

 

Thanks. It's nice to be recognized for the decades of stress and long hours it took to get here.

 

We have it easy on gas prices. We also have a really big, expensive navy.

 

Things are changing:
Volvo has updated their announcement: expect a 125 mpg hybrid wagon with a 745 mile range and all wheel drive (diesel front, electric rear) to be available as soon as 2012 in Europe. It will debut at the Geneva car show.

2012 Volvo V60 Plug-in Hybrid, 2011 Geneva Auto Show Exclusive Preview

However, no plans yet for US distribution. The experts say the US doesn't like diesels.

 

Ding...ding...ding..
We have a winner.

Here is an interesting article from 2005 about oil "shortage' supply/demand.

Oil supply

Excerpt from above article.
"Oil, Oil, Everywhere..." was the title of a fact-filled essay is a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, which showed how absurd the "oil shortage" fears truly are:

"To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption."

Mind you, those are merely two oil fields in Venezuela and Canada, comparative little leaguers vs. the major league oil fields in the Persian Gulf region. In a speech this past October, Alan Greenspan noted that, "During the past decade... gross additions to [world] reserves have significantly exceeded the extraction of oil the reserves replaced."


Baa..baa...baa...The oil companies second source of income is sheep herding.

 

Oil sands such as those in Alberta are far more environmentally damaging to extract and create usable fuels from. Canada tends to be somewhat more environmentally cautious then the US, something which may dent enthusiasm to go raking in the Alberta fields.

 

Yes, I'm sorry... this is what you get when people who don't know how little they know about a subject go on national media and bloviate; it eventually trickles down to misinformation like you're seeing here.

The rich oil fields that made billionaires last century are gone; there is no more low-lying fruit, no more "light, sweet crude" oil left. PERIOD. What remains is deep reserves in shale under the ocean and potable water tables and oil sands in locations around the world; none of which is environment-friendly to extract and all of which costs in the neighborhood of 10x-100x as much to extract as the above mentioned light, sweet crude.

All of you who bought into the craze started by a GM advertising campaign which made the SUV the vehicle of choice in America, well done. This ad campaign was created entirely to abuse a loophole in the gas-guzzler laws intended to make it possible for small, family farmers to still afford the medium & light trucks they needed to operate their farms. GM (and everybody else who soon followed suit) thereby added $4,000 to $12,000 hidden profit per vehicle by reclassifying as a light truck a vehicle that was marketed as a passenger vehicle, all at the taxpayer's expense... and just see how much good that loophole did the small, family farmer.

The near-tripling of American demand for fuel that ensued has depleted those reserves of cheap oil in half the time they would have lasted otherwise; yet still we drive blithely on, unconcerned. Enjoy it while you can; gas will soon cost more than whiskey.

mnem
It's a good thing Canada bought up so much American debt; if I'm lucky, my son won't HAVE to learn Mandarin to get by... Eh, hoser?

 

Just waiting for the electric car market to start pumping out vehicles to bring the price down to acceptable levels. I'd love a Tesla Roadster, but not at £50,000

As for the OP, I doubt the 17,000 jobs will have many repercussions outside of Japan.

 

And what good do you suppose an electric car is to the environment? Unless you generate your electricity purely from solar or your own hydro plant, you are STILL consuming in this order: Coal(44%), natural gas(24%), nuclear(21%) to generate the electricity you need to charge that car. EACH does massive ecological damage; from the "clean coal" lie to natural gas-fired plants (which produce more power in the US than nuclear) that pollute the air (Yes, natural gas burns cleaner than coal, but it still produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen & sulphur oxides, plus still carries the environmental cost of heavy industrial maintenance like any electric plant, to the radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants.

We like to think of electricity as a clean power source; lulled into a false sense of security by images of pure flowing water passing through hydroelectric plants, but it's just a lie we tell ourselves. Less than 7% of our electricity is generated this way; the rest is generated by one of the fossil or nuclear fuels listed above, which means that electricity is NOT a fuel substitute, but rather a storage & transmission medium for one of those forms of fuel listed above.

When you add to that the actual environmental cost of electric vehicles as they are produced today; high-tech plastics and poisonous, hard to recycle rare earth metals used in the batteries, plus approximately 4 times as much electronic infrastructure as a conventional car, the manufacturing carbon footprint of an electric or hybrid vehicle is 3 times that of its conventional counterpart.

In simple terms; this means that you would have to drive your Prius on the original batteries, speed control, motor and transmission for 12-14 years to bring its carbon footprint down to equal that of a Saturn; and THAT would be assuming that all the electricity you ever used to power it was generated without burning fossil fuels and you never ran it on gasoline. EVER.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that this makes electric & hybrid cars as they are produced now the antithesis of eco-friendly; they are in fact the most cynical end-run around real eco-friendliness ever devised.

You want to REALLY decrease your carbon footprint, but can't afford not to drive? Shop around for your favorite economy car ( I like Saturns, but that's up to you) and find one in decent shape with a blown motor that you can save from the junkyard. Put a low-mileage junkyard motor in it, drive it for another 5-6 years. There. If you recycle the old motor, you've just saved the manufacturing carbon footprint of another whole car, while saving yourself a bunch of dough. If you think of it as an alternative to buying a Prius, you've just saved the manufacturing carbon footprint of 3 conventional cars; this means you saved not only your carbon footprint, but that of the original owner's as well; meaning your car gets a break-even in the whole deal.

Plus - here's the really funny part - due to the inherent inefficiency of electric transmission and storage in a battery-operated vehicle... if you drive a reasonably efficient (read any modern 4-cylinder) car, you've burned less fossil fuel to drive it than your electric plant most likely burned to generate the power to charge its all-electric or hybrid counterpart for the same period of time.

mnem
HUM-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m...

 

Looks like those energy creation statistics are for the US market - I'm sat in Europe.

The UK market is broadly similar at the moment, but there is a *lot* of investment in offshore wind farms for electricity. Personally I disagree that nuclear is so environmentally damaging as long as the waste is stored correctly. Most coal power stations in the UK are designated to be decommisioned in the 2010's, to be replaced by renewable energy and nuclear (and thankfully there are no significant fault lines in Europe so there's little chance of a repeat of the situation in Japan).

I also do a far bit of work in France, and roughly 75% of energy is produced via nuclear power.

While I agree that there are significantly more electronics and harmful materials in batteries, I can't believe that the one-off cost in the car will be anything near as much as the pollutants generated in the manufacture of a petrol or diesel car and fuel usage over 10 years.

So basically I'm well aware that electricity is an energy transmitter, but as long as the electricity is produced in a green manner, then there is a lot less to worry about.

 

I'm specifically talking about the US market as regards the fossil fuel insanity. Most of Europe has not bought into the SUV idiocy; probably due to the fact of fuel that costs more per liter than it costs per gallon over here.

I'm afraid your estimation of the UK's electrical "Green-ness" is highly out of proportion as well; They primarily burn coal and natural gas just like the US, plus they have virtually NO hydro. The plan for decommissioning is actually more along the lines of "By 2025 or so"; and the majority of those will be retrofitted to burn natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel. The UK "Renewable" fuels plan is mostly hot air; the infrastructure doesn't exist to transport the fuel, and the people who were supposed to foot the bill are already arguing that they cannot deploy because the customer base cannot pay for the increased cost of production with alternative fuel.

As for nuclear power... I really can't say I believe it's POSSIBLE to store nuclear waste safely; we (humans) have a historically short attention span. We can't even be bothered to make sure the containment vessels on ACTIVE reactors are intact when there are people crawling all over the place; you think we'd ever bother to scope out what's at the bottom of an old salt mine? Hell, in 100 years, do you think we'd even know where all our nuclear waste, just that which we have NOW, is actually buried?

HELL NO.

We are talking about a material that will be one of the most poisonous substances ever created for more time than it took for humans to evolve.

Do you REALLY think we as a species have the discipline to shepherd such a responsibility for MILLIONS of years, when we've ALREADY lost thousands of tons of plutonium from the fall of Russia and we already have hundreds of documented cases of leakage from the nuclear waste we've already "stored safely"?

The same species that made George Bush possible? That has people who actually LISTEN to people like Bill-O and Rush and spawned Cheney and Sarah Palin?

As a species, we don't see anything further away than the tip of our collective pen!s. Nuclear waste is a responsibility for AEONS, and we can't even be bothered to keep the places we LIVE clean in the last CENTURY.

mnem
Poison is poison.

 

What he said with this added. If there were a plan to safely store nuclear waste, bearing in mind that the taxpayers have already poured $7 Billion down the rathole called Yucca Mountain, now deemed unusable, the Nuclear Power Industry would cease to exist as the cost of any such plan would make Nuclear economically unfeasible, assuming someone held them responsible for funding the waste disposal up front. Of course if the get rid of government regulation crowd likes, we can just leave that problem for the next 10,000 or so generations to deal with. That way the stockholders of the nuclear plants can make a quick buck and the taxpayers can pick up the tab for cleaning up their mess.
CAP

 

Ummm... isn't this essentially what we've already done for the last 50 years? Seems to work for those in Washington...

mnem
"...you wanna tell them some crap like you got frostbite from fighting polar bears. You go right ahead. They will test sh!t on you. GLOWING sh!t." Random henchman - Minion Comics

 

As I said...the UK/US energy market is currently broadly similar. I'm well aware we burn a lot of coal and gas at the moment.

Again as I said...we are investing heavily in renewable sources. Scotland is aiming for 40% of electricity to be generated from renewable sources by 2020 by large expansions of wind generators. I'm not quite sure what infrastructure you think is required to transport fuel - they tap straight into the electrical grid....

Yes we are the same species that generated Bush, Palin, Cheney and whoever else you want to name. But we are also the same species that created Einstein, Shakespeare, Aristotle & Hawking. I'm not advocating the permanent use of nuclear power....just enough to tide us over at the moment. Things like the planned high voltage transmission cable between Norway and the UK also allow the UK to run off Norwegian electricity (which is predominately hydroelectric), and also makes it easier to establish off-shore wind farms in the middle of the North Sea and transport that electricity back home again. I also can't find any notes that say coal plants are to be turned into gas plants; everything I see notes that gas plants are planned to be scaled back just as the coal ones.

Point taken about the SUV market....my (diesel) car gets around 41mpg (US gallons) which I'd say is about normal for a diesel car.

But anyhow; my overall point was that an electric car is still a good option even if the majority of electricity to charge it with comes from non-green sources. Because it allows the car to continue running on green sources when switchovers to renewable energies happen in the electricity generating market.

Also electricity tends to be a lot cheaper then petrol/diesel. I pay roughly £1.40 per litre of diesel here.....which is $8.75 per US gallon I think. (1 US gallon = 3.785 litres, & £1 = $1.65).

 

The problem with responsibility is that discipline is only as strong as its weakest link; we are entrusting the future of the planet to people like BP.

And again; you are talking about plans for the future. I am talking about all the poisonous material generated in the production of electric/hybrid vehicles NOW and for at least the next 20 years, IF those plans actually materialize, which the course of human history (and not just American history) shows has geometrically diminishing probability as the actual fiscal cost increases and the time to pay those costs gets nearer.

Right now, and for the foreseeable future, electric/hybrid vehicles AS THEY ARE PRODUCED NOW are one of the biggest cons ever foisted upon the public. PERIOD.

You CAN produce an electric vehicle that is no more damaging to the environment in its production than an electric vehicle; GM did it in the late 90s with the EV1. Even with flaws in the battery design they were a raging success with the end-user, and they used lead-acid batteries (the first round with liquid electrolyte; a bad idea which cost them a recall to upgrade to Gel-Cel batteries) which are inexpensively nearly 100% recycleable and simple, analog speed controls which are still sought by people building their own electric vehicles today. People were lined up to buy them; they had more pre-orders than they could fill for 2 years. Then the 2nd Bush happened, and suddenly they were canceling the program and crushing every EV1 they made.

A coincidence that this happened immediately after the most pro-oil President in the history of history took office? Sure. Here, let me tell you a story about health care reform...

mnem
*Still allergic to the BS*

 

I'll merely point out in return that my first post referring to cars that you jumped upon and lynched me with indicated that I wasn't looking at buying an electric car right now, but when prices drop to a reasonable level by mass production. Which will probably be 5-6 years at a guess.

I disagree that electric/hybrid cars are the "biggest con". Your very post indicates that electric cars can be made that are environmentally friendly, and as electricity generation sources can change, it allows an easy change over to renewable sources (electric solar panels are starting to take off here as well, mounted on people's roofes). Something you can't really do with a petrol/diesel car - you are stuck with it for the life of the car. "For the next 20 years" is a sweeping phrase, and I am disinclined to agree with it...who knows what advances the next 5-10 years will have.

I won't mention the oil/USA/Bush comment further as those type of debates usually descend in to meaningless drivel.

I'm not pretending that getting an electric car will suddenly be the saviour of the planet and we will all be able to dance around trees which spring to life from our green touches. But I believe that electric cars are a better way to go as battery technology improves, and electricity generation becomes greener.

And frankly anything that weens us off oil for which the supply and price is generally controlled by a bunch of cartel middle eastern countries is surely a good thing.

 

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lynch you; I meant to try and make you aware of the realities of energy and the "Green Movement" as it is happening in this world today. I didn't say electric vehicles couldn't be an improvement; I said they WON'T because the people who make them and the people who make electricity are in cahoots with Big Oil.

We will NEVER be free of Middle Eastern Oil as long as they have it to sell; they own the US Government and they leverage that into other markets that don't want or need them.

If we REALLY wanted to be free of it, we easily could - they provide us with only 23% of the oil we buy here in the States. We buy more oil from Canada already than we do from them; there's no reason we couldn't pull out of there completely and let them get on with the business of killing each other like they've been doing for the last 1500 years. It's really none of our business, and they're NEVER going to accept our meddling in their affairs.

We don't buy oil from the Middle East because we have to; we could certainly buy it on the open market like the rest of the world and not pay for our oil in soldiers' lives and providing free armies for people who can clearly afford (have you seen the monstrosity they're building in Dubai?) to hire their own mercenaries. I'm certain it would cost much less in both dollars and human lives.

More than 80% of the electricity generated in the world is made with fossil fuel of one sort or another or nuclear; the people who produce those fuels are ALL THE SAME GROUPS OF PEOPLE.

My major point is this; don't believe the lies stupid people tell you to make you feel better about they way they're raping you and the planet for their own greed. No matter how loud and how often they tell those lies, you are smarter than they are and you can see through it if you just bother to look.

If you choose not to, then who's really the dumb one?

mnem
Repeat after me: "I am smarter then the people who lie to me, I will not choose to be deceived."

 

That's one way to address the issue. If I see a company that is raping and pillaging I buy their stock.

Edit: Mnem, Dubai is not so much oil rich. They more closely resemble a western economic model. Those towers and islands are not pissed away oil wealth. They wheel and deal... with people who are pissing away oil wealth