Even with the high value of the Euro, high labor costs, and stiff environmental regulation, WMF continues to make and sell high quality cooking equipment not only in Germany, and the other EU countries but also exports to Korea.
Their deep draw operation for making pots is interesting.
download short video in English 4.5 min / 21 mb Title: Quality Cookware, Pots and Pans ... Pre-Christmas Consumer Boom? URL:
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Anyone know of comparable US companies/operations?
Do we need to hire German accountants? German managers? German workers? German designers?
At least half of what we makes goes to Germany and Switzerland. America can compete, just not on the cheapo stuff. Germany doesn't go cheap, never have. They are the perfect customers.
What is sad is the amount of protection and purposeful inattention that they were given in the decades immediately following the war.
Deporting them instead of actually investigating what crimes they committed, and prosecuting them for those crimes, also does not seem like the proper amount of justice.
Posts disappearing from Google, may never see your reply...
Anyway, do I think the bush regime is actually a pack of nazis? Of course not. Do I think that they are stripping away rights and s*****ng all over the constitution? You betcha. Do I think they are using tactics that are used during a totalitarian/ fascist takeover? Shit, they're doing that right out of the playbook. That may not be their actual goal, but that doesn't mean they aren't using those tactics.
If it suited the current republican's powerbase that gun rights be universally stripped, do you think they would hesitate one microsecond? Do you?
Is their moral basis for their actions at just about zero credibility? Ask someone from another country who we've sought to have prosecuted as a war criminal for waterboarding about that.
Because I think the bushiites are a bunch of moral-less criminals who are subverting this nations principals, do I think the democrats would do a better job? Shit, you may as well ask if I think islam is a nice cuddly religion. Fuck no on both counts. Both parties are fundamentally flawed, operate at the behest of industry, are morally bankrupt in any meaningful sense of the word, do not have the nations best interests at heart, neither seek to represent the ideals that founded this country.
The repubs and dems have different goals, but both are working towards worlds where neither you nor I mean shit.
As opposed to Bill Clinton and his s*****ng on the second amendment. I see. Which of your rights do you fantasize are being infringed to the extent that Bill's lies did to the second?
Just imagine how nervous you'd been if Clinton and his cronies, many of whom are still in congress, had succeeded in the "Mr and Mrs America, turn them all in". You wouldn't have those of us who are armed to deter the DHS from doing you your imaginary harm.
And, your leftists are "useful idiots", if you go with that line of thought. Disarm the masses to let the totalitarians take power. Is that what you want? Because that's what clinton/clinton/pelosi/schumer/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc want to do.
Yes, they would. They understand who supports them. THEY learned from
1996. You, apparently, did not. Good. Keep being ignorant.
Non-uniformed combatants, you mean? Tell me exactly what protections they are provided when they're pretending to be civilians when the battle our army?
And yet, the Democrats would disarm the law-abiding populace, while the Republicans trust us not to suddenly turn evil.
WMF does an excellent job of marketing at the high end of the cookware business. Their production methods are pretty conventional: deep-drawing and ironing of pots, with bonded aluminum bottoms. Paul Revere managed this with copper bottoms over 200 years ago.
Their total sales run around $600 million/year or so; very similar share levels to Waterford-Wedgwood, for example, in another segment of the household goods market, and around 4X that of Revere Ware, which has 25% of the US market for cookware. But WMF is in a lot more markets than Revere Ware.
George, if your question is why US companies can't do this, the answer is they can, at least in terms of technology. There's nothing unconventional that I can see in their products. But this market is not one in which US companies have established broad-based high-end branding. Smaller US companies have established such branding in some specialty household items. I don't know what their status is now but the French company SEB used to own the high-end pressure-cooker market for non-commercial gourmet cooks. I think WMF pushed them aside when the distribution in the US moved from little gourmet shops to bigger retailers.
The bottom line is that in today's markets, no one country is going to dominate every segment. German companies continue to play off of the reputation of German products for advanced engineering, and, since the late '60s, they've elbowed into the design end against the French and Italians. That's a key market in western Europe and it functions very differently from those markets in the US.
If the problem is not in the technology, they why do we keep attempting to solve the "problem" by increasing the numbers of engineers and technicians?
If the failure is in sales, marketing, business strategy, and strategic planning, as it appears to be, then these are the areas that must be corrected.
The lure of the quick buck and easy money through financial slight-of-hand appears to have diverted an entire generation of American higher management away from the generation of actual wealth through high-value added operations because the profits are long-term, and on paper slightly lower, albeit resulting in physical assets with real value such as plants, equipment, and tooling, rather than piles of paper such as derivatives and debentures.
That's a good question, although I'm not sure that there is a problem in the first place.
I don't think that's the issue, George. I think it's a matter of making a company as profitable as possible, and that doesn't necessarily mean serving the high end of the market. The first thing I noticed in looking up financial data on WMF versus Revere Ware is that WMF has 4.4 times as much sales volume...with 9 times as many employees.
Maybe. But I suspect that Revere Ware's ROI is higher. That's only a suspicion but the sales/employee ratios suggest that's the case.
How much market share does WMF have in the US? It can't be very much. At 110 Euros per pot, I can't imagine they're burning up the cash registers in this country.
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