OT: Why can't we do this in the US?

Ja, vee need all of zoze. Und ze rezults vood be somesing called Daimler-Chrysler.

KG

They aren't called "Masters of Business Annihilation" for nothing. :(

Some snipped

Some years ago we bid a job to a major oil company in Indonesia to provide some 100 dump trucks. During the pre-bid meetings the oil company indicated that they would prefer US or European made trucks. We contacted Kenworth - who had just appointed a representative in Singapore.

During various discussions I asked the new rep why Kenworth had not always had a rep in SEA and she told me that Kenworth reckoned that it would generate more profit by gaining another few percent of the U.S. market then selling all the trucks in Indonesia and having to set up distributors, parts supply, dealer support, etc.

In short large manufacturers are not stupid and they always go where the money is.

Bruce-in-Bangkok (Note:remove underscores from address for reply)

Jack wrote in news:fjvonr$1e7$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

What? Making pot and pans?

Maybe I missed the point seeing as how I can't imagine why making pots and pans is some great feat.

But food just tastes so much better cooked in pans and pans that were deep drawn to a tolerance of 0.0002

"Jeffry Lebowski" wrote in news:r4CdnQbgV5ThT_nanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@scnresearch.com:

No, it's the 5 fold premium you pay for a Teutonic masterpiece that makes the food taste ever so much better.

My curiosity up, I went over to the cabinet and the first pot I pulled out was made by this company -

Stamped "Made in the USA" right on the bottom.

I still don't get it. Making pots and pans is about as low tech as factory grunt work can get. What's the big deal?

I suppose if I search some more I can find a couple of other US makers of pots and pans. Like these -

Hell, here is a pile of them -

Master of Business Annihilation?

============= Making the pots and pans is not the feat. The feat is making a long-term profit making pots and pans in a high-cost high-regulation environment.

Why/how are the WMF management able and willing to domestically design, produce and sell their products long-term? As another poster noted, WMF has 4.4 times the sales volume and 9 times the number of employees of the comparable American producer [Revere Ware] of cook ware -- why?

It may not be the business leadership/management at all. Trade policies and tariff barriers may the key factor.

This is not a critical economic or national defense sector, but a concrete example of a company thriving in a high-cost environment making low tech products, but if we are unable to identify the success factors in this simple concrete example, how can the US possibly compete in more complex areas such as automobiles, semiconductors, aero-space, etc.

In the aggregate, the US private sector from finance to manufacturing, is "getting its clock cleaned." By itself this is not a problem, but the consequential damages this causes in governmental revenue shortfalls [huge and increasing budget deficits], increasing imports [huge and increasing current accounts trade deficits] and contracting economic opportunities affects everyone.

It is correctly observed "The Business of America is Business." This being the case, just as "war is too important to be left to the generals," so too is "business too important to be left to the MBAs and International Trade Representatives."

So just what is WMF doing that Revere Ware can and should be doing, particularly items/areas involving engineering, technology and production methods?

And that's been the story about US manufacturing for decades, which is why we aren't always effective in foreign markets when they *do* have a lot of potential.

We weaned off of neo-mercantilism a century ago. The Chinese are repeating the whole mercantilist cycle that western countries went through for a century or more before that. And the Germans still have some of that mercantilist blood running in their veins.

The result is that you wind up collecting a lot of junk while withholding from your economy the benefits of freer trade. Adam Smith had an example over 200 years ago that was right on the mark for this thread. He was referring to England but it could apply to anyone.: if you make pots and pans and you use tariffs or other supports to minimize imports in favor of exports, eventually you wind up owning the world's largest collection of pots and pans. d8-)

-- Ed Huntress

HAHAHAHAHAHAH

Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, Africa and India will be sure your pots and pans get built Dan.

Our worst case scenario are the hard working Italian, Irish, Russian, Chinese, Slovak, French and German Americans that get refused a job because they can make pots and pans better then they can at less pay.. 15.00 dollars and hour.. all because the federal government says there not qualified to make pots and pans $10-15 an hour.

In the words of Martin Luther King.. Let all white brothers and sisters stick together and help each out more then ever! or all you white brothers and sisters are not gonna have a country, neighborhood, nor a home to come home to.

John

F. George McDuffee wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

There are around a dozen or so US manufacturers of pots and pans. Obviously they are making a profit. Otherwise they would be gone.

Probably some protectionism. I would rather have the company with half the employees per unit of sales volume (Revere).

My point is that we are competing in both low tech and high tech sectors of the economy. You'd be hard pressed to find some area where we couldn't compete.

Just as soon as conventional wisdom has it that we can't make machine tools, along comes Haas and Fadal. How about televisions? There's no way we can compete, right? Well what about Vizio?

There are more high end kitchenware companies in the US than anywhere else as far as I can tell. After al, we can afford the crap, Chinese workers can't.

Utter nonsense. You're mixing apples and oranges and making wild assumptions about who is "getting their clock cleaned".

Government shortfalls are caused by spending more than they take in. A large portion of said spending is profligate waste.

The current generation of MBA's are far better than the previous generations as far as I can tell. Also being that the US is the world's largest exporter of goods and services, I would have to say we are doing fairly well in international trade.

It would seem to me that they (WMF) have twice as many employess as they should. That will end badly for them I'm afraid.

Now someone else made that claim about the US being the biggest exporter earlier in the year and a reply cited the US governments own figures showing that German was a larger exporter. I can't find that source but this was easy to find

Mostly to the EU, eh? If the US counted things that way, I should think Kaleefornia would be a MUCH bigger "exporter" than Germany.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Please explain you "thought" processes to arrive such a claim?

Tom

Ayup. California is now down to the 7th largest economy in the world. It used to be 6th.

Gunner

========================= Another "yes, but" problematique...

In this case the resolution is the [typical] use of the same name for very different things.

As another poster observed, Germany's high export ranking may be due to exports within the EEC, where in the US we do not count interstate sales as exports.

I wish this [interstate] "current account trade data was available as this could help explain why some state economies are booming [large current account interstate trade surpluses?] and some states are in a serious financial bind [e.g. California] because of serious interstate current account trade deficits, e.g. the electrical power tube job. and considerable remission of money to other countries by "guest" workers.

As Gunner noted, California by itself is the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world, but even the large economies can be brought to ruin by uncontrolled and continual governmental and trade deficits. This shows that the size of the economy is not really a factor other than the old [but true] expression "the bigger they are, the harder they fall," which is the current situation in California.

These problems are greatly exacerbated by the use of "smoke and mirrors" AKA "cobwebs and moonbeams" to "balance the books," as this evades the balanced budget requirements in most state constitutions, and makes "the day of reckoning" (which always occurs) just that much harder.

Several additional problems:

The DW site specified "goods" as exports. The US current account trade data generally includes both goods AND SERVICES, including intangibles such as insurance, finance/banking and "entertainment."

The US data is also complicated by the large number of nominally US corporations that are now actually transnational in that their gross sales are included in the aggregate US data, but they "money" their "exports" [which in many cases don't originate in the US] is not actually "in" the US domestic economy because it is held outside the US in "tax haven" bank accounts, and indeed may not be in US dollars. Thus the old sylogism "when American companies do well, America does well, and when American does well, Americans do well," [AKA "a rising tide lifts all boats"] no longer applies.

I was hoping for some insights from the group, something like Peter Drucker had in his book "In Search of Excellence."

Hmm.. mabye not, GSP of $876 billion vs. Germany's GDP of $2.6 trillion and exports of $1.13 trillion. Less GDP per capita, even, slightly.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

David Billington wrote in news:4767c021$0$13936$ snipped-for-privacy@news.zen.co.uk:

Goods only. Not I wrote "goods and services". Also Germany's export value in USD is greatly helped by a strong Euro, not a big uptick in manufacturing.