Another 18,000 synergy savings on the unemployment rolls. These are all high paying professional and manufacturing jobs. GONE. POOF!!!
Welcome to the Obama jobs recovery.
But they have no need to worry. These formerly employed professionals can just take in a Guatemalan illegal immigrant and earn $73,000 per year – TAX FREE!!!!
Isn’t America great?
Maybe these professionals can utilize their high tech skills as a clerk at an Apple Store or waiting on the oligarchs at their Hamptons cocktail parties.
How much do you want to bet Microsoft will be hiring a few thousand Far Eastern slave laborers to pick up the slack.
If we just lower the corporate tax rate, I’m sure Microsoft will hire them back.
Microsoft Announces 18,000 Layoffs, Three Time More Than Expected
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/17/2014 08:16 -0400
While the news was reported earlier this week, it is perhaps notable that what was once considered the leading US tech company has also succumbed to the great “jobless” US recovery (in which the US economy is somehow adding 200K+ jobs every month even as it is firing millions). Furthermore, what was supposed to be 6,000 layoffs has just tripled to 18,000.
From the PR:
Microsoft Corp. today announced a restructuring plan to simplify its operations and align the recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services business with the company’s overall strategy.
These steps will result in the elimination of up to 18,000 positions over the next year. Of the total, about 12,500 professional and factory positions will be eliminated through synergies and strategic alignment of the Nokia Devices and Services business acquired by Microsoft on April 25.
The actions associated with the plan are expected to be substantially complete by Dec. 31, 2014, and fully completed by June 30, 2015.
The company expects to incur pre-tax charges of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion over the next four quarters, including $750 million to $800 million for severance and related benefit costs, and $350 million to $800 million of asset-related charges.
If only Tim Geithner had qualified his “Welcome to the Recovery” August 2010, NYT oped a little bit better, none of this would have been a surprise. Actually, it isn’t a surprise at all. And now, back to MSFT stock which surges on the news and lifts the market to recorder highs even as thousands more end up on the street, which has largely been the whole story of the “recovery” to date.
Silicon Valley, a wholly owned and controlled subsidiary of the NSA and Obama, is getting their asses handed to them by the rest of the world, who’s dropping USSA tech at an alarming rate. Google, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and the rest deserve the fucking their going to get; taking away our privacy and freedom (and the rest of the world). Case in point, Microsoft is laying people off big time, Game over, good riddance.
Microsoft Layoffs: Insane M&A Frenzy Leads To Next Jobs Crisis
Submitted by testosteronepit on 07/16/2014 12:21 -0400
Wolf Richter http://www.wolfstreet.com http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Global M&A volume in the first half was the highest since 2007. It was led by the largest corporations, including GE, that borrowed for nearly free thanks to global ZIRP, to load up their balance sheet with spending money. Deal volume in the first half soared 75% to $1.75 trillion, closing in on the record set in 2007 of $2.28 trillion.
What was “notable,” according to Gregg Lemkau, co-head of global M&A at Goldman Sachs, was “the blue-chip nature of the companies who are doing the acquiring.”
What was even more notable was that the Great M&A Frenzy of 2007/2008 was followed by the Great Jobs Crisis that kicked off in earnest in 2009.
Deals are sold to investors on the basis of “creating value” with terms like “efficiencies” and “synergies” – code words for cost cutting and mass-layoffs. M&A jockeys like HP have lost sight of their business model and can only grow revenues, if at all, through endless acquisitions. Followed by layoffs. Sometimes they’re months apart, sometimes years. HP, after 11 quarters in a row of falling revenues, is still announcing waves of layoffs. A friend of mine, who came to HP via an acquisition of course, survived two waves of layoffs before the financial crisis, but was swept up in the third. Countless waves later, HP just announced another 16,000 layoffs on top of the 34,000 it had announced earlier.
Acquisitions, layoffs, and cost-cutting are the simplest things to do for a CEO, as opposed to inventing things and boosting sales organically, which is hard. And analysts eat them up. They call the dizzying expenses “non-cash charges” to be ignored, and they too decorate their pronouncements with “efficiencies” and “synergies.” Hence, a wave of acquisitions is invariably followed by cost-cutting, destruction of productive capacity, and layoffs.
Last September, Microsoft agreed to acquire Nokia’s mobile-phone business and promised $600 million in annual cost savings – the efficiencies and synergies – within 18 months. Now their meaning is becoming clear: “people who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public” told Bloomberg that the company is planning what might be the biggest wave of job cuts in its history.
Exact numbers weren’t mentioned, but Microsoft’s largest wave of layoffs happened during the financial crisis when it axed 5,800 people. Now, Satya Nadella, CEO since February, is putting his stamp on the company. Last week, he sent a professionally produced and designed memo to his “team,” the lucky ones who would be able to keep their jobs. It said in 3,000 words that big changes were coming to Microsoft. What it lacked in specifics, it made up for with glitz.
Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on this core strategy. Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified.
With this memo, he wanted to “galvanize employees around what our soul is,” he said in a phone interview. That was a warning. But he refused to admit that the company was planning layoffs.
Layoffs are inevitable after acquisitions. Wall Street demands them. They’re used to rationalize the acquisitions in the first place. The lexicon of corporate euphemisms for axing people includes henceforth Nadella’s two gems, “Job responsibilities will evolve,” and “Processes will be simplified.”
A few M&A deals here and there may not have any measurable impact on the global economy though the layoffs still occur a few months or a year or two later. But when corporate mastodons buy each other out and merge with each other in relentless mega-waves, the resulting cost-cutting and layoffs will have an impact. And there have been 17,698 deals in the first half of this year alone!
But the delays between the deal announcement and the moment when employees are actually shown the door can be significant. Deals take time to complete, and nothing can happen until they’re complete. In complex deals, this can stretch to a year. When governments get involved, it can take even longer. Once the deal is complete, employees often stay on for a while. So the time from the peak of the M&A frenzy to rising unemployment claims can be so long that it’s all too easy to obscure the link between them.
Wall Street’s financial engineers and corporate CEOs alike relish brandishing terms like “synergies” and “Job responsibilities will evolve” to dazzle investors with hope and boost stock prices. But they want to make sure that the M&A frenzy that makes them and the players around them so rich doesn’t get blamed for a jobs crisis a year later. And the corporate lapdog media gush about “Merger Monday” and repeat the M&A lingo without pointing to the large-scale job destruction that the estimated 35,000 global deals this year will inevitably entail.
But the frenzy is starting to show up on the Fed’s radar. Chair Janet Yellen poked with her dull needle at bubbles in momentum stocks and leveraged loans, and threatened to end ZIRP sooner, and more rapidly “than currently envisioned.” Which would end the M&A frenzy. Fasten your seatbelts. Read…. Yellen Warns Investors
“Microsoft Lays Off 18,000. Latest Release Of Windows Now Crashes Every 18 Minutes”
———– http://www.microsoft.support.com/we_dont_know_what_the_fuck_were_doing
YIPPEE!!!!!
THEY SHOULD HAVE FIRED 36,000. THE STOCK WOULD REALLY SOAR.
Microsoft shares trade at 14-year high in premarket
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) rallied 2.5% to $45.21 in premarket trading Thursday, which would be the highest level seen during regular trading hours since April 2000, after the software giant announced it was cutting 14% of its workforce. At the current premarket price, Microsoft shares have retraced 68% of the decline from the all-time closing high of $59.56 reached on Dec. 27, 1999, to the March 9, 2009 bear-market closing low of $15.15. Through Wednesday’s close, the Dow industrials component’s stock had gained 18% year to date and 22% over the last year, compared with gains of 3.4% and 11%, respectively, for the Dow.
Value Added Of Every Microsoft Employee: Negative $1.5 Million
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/17/2014 09:40 -0400
Since the advance reports of layoffs at Microsoft started circulating this Sunday, the giant tech company has surged over 8%. This has raised the market cap of the behemoth by almost $28 Billion. Today we get the ‘news’ that Microsoft was laying off a record 18,000 employees (more than tripled the 2009 dump of 5,900 employees).That means – for all activist investors out there looking to raise MSFT share price – a $1.5 million market cap boost for each scalp, which, in other words, is the marginal “value added” of every currently employed Microsoft worker.
1. Notice how they no longer bother to tell Americans, how their American company is treating the American employees? Or did I miss it? Nowhere are they telling us how many AMERICAN jobs are getting the axe. There are two reasons for that. 1- Nokia is a foreign company, I’ll assume the bulk of the Nokia business cuts will be overseas, with sales being cut here and 2 – there aren’t that many American jobs left. Still, to be applicable to the health of OUR country, that info is of utmost importance. Which I would assume is the exact reason they are hiding it.
2. The most ironic part is that while any remaining AMERICAN STEM grads will see the axe – if not train their replacements – and the H1-B visa holders will retain their jobs (albeit, underpaid to American cost of living standards, but great for third world imports, the irony is that some H1-B’s will be axed, then have to go home, or find another job, good freaking luck to them, and us. Smart foreigners could turn to crime and hide, not like it doesn’t happen everyday. Ok, I was wrong, the most ironic part will be when the evidence of the continuous greasing and hounding of CONgress by Gates and MS for more visas, when some upcoming job increases occur, they will all go to the new visa guys, bank on it. The gutting of America from the inside continues.
3. 18,000 fewer jobs equals hundreds of no longer needed vendors. Even IT guys have IT guys, and TP guys, and paper guys, and coffee guys. Again, the gutting of the middle everywhere, American middle in particular (for now), continues.
4. Yet more freaking proof that these mega-mergers only benefit a handful while destroying thousands. Never before in history has it been more apparent that the chosen rich get obscenely richer, while the rest of us watch our ability to tread water be taken away.
5. And, of course, the number of current mergers/acquisitions is at record highs, which means the numbers of the middle class slitting their own throats after losing it all will soon be setting new records too.
Why on God’s green earth can’t people look around and wake the f*#& up?
The Losers From U.S. Sanctions: AMERICAN Businesses
Submitted by George Washington on 07/17/2014 11:34 -0400
Who are the losers from U.S. sanctions? American companies.
Two giant U.S. business groups – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers – ran ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post protesting sanctions against Russia. These are not do-good political groups … they are conservative, hard-nosed pro-business groups.
The New York Times reports today:
American business groups have objected to unilateral sanctions, arguing that they would only hurt domestic businesses while their European competitors swooped in.
The National Association of Manufacturers said it “is disappointed that the U.S. is fundamentally extending sanctions in increasingly unilateral ways that will undermine U.S. commercial engagement and reduce the effectiveness of the measures imposed.”
Zero Hedge notes that the sanctions don’t seem to have hurt Russia much:
[The U.S. has] underperformed Russia by almost 20% since unleashing the first set of sanctions and sell recommendations ….
U.S. News and World Report pointed out in April:
Sanctioning Russia’s energy sector is a bad idea that will only marginally hurt Russia ….
Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer, and U.S. or E.U. sanctions against Russia will dramatically lower the global supply, thus raising global prices.
Bloomberg also reports that American power plants are “desperately” turning to Russia for their coal.
And sanctioning Russia has also pushed Russia to bypass US-controlled oil and gas systems altogether, and pushed Russia, China and Iran closer together.
The Wall Street Journal reports that – according to a new study – sanctions against Iran cost the U.S. as much as $175.3 billion in lost export opportunities over 18 years
In other words, by demonizing countries instead of peacefully trading with them, the U.S. is shooting itself in the foot economically.
This is not an isolated problem …
Ron Paul says that sanctions against Russia and Iran are acts of war.
And what exactly did Russia do in the Ukraine? Something like subvert and overthrow the democratically elected gov. of a sovereign nation? This is beyond bizarre. And WE’RE punishing Russia? Good lord, we’re a directionless nation in decline.
How ’bout a moratorium on super-size mergers and H1-B visas? Seems it’s high time to me.
These layoffs are good you see…It means more efficiency and more profits, right? This will open the doors for more jobs to be created in more productive areas of the economy like… burger flipping (for now) and those “high tech” which robots will soon be able to perform better than we can, and more cheaply, and we will all live like the people in Star Trek…well, actually more like the people in Elysium.