The technology industry has blown an economic fuse prompting companies worldwide to restructure operations, but a cultural aversion to dumping domestic staff could hamper recovery chances for Japan's high-tech leaders, analysts say.
Over the past month major Japanese electronics firms have said they would axe around 65,000 jobs citing slack demand for technology. But a closer inspection of the figures reveal most reductions will come through natural attrition rather than hard layoffs, with more than 25,000 cuts targeted overseas.
"The best thing to improve efficiency is to cut staff in Japan, because labor costs are high and it is very expensive to run factories here, but this is harder to do, which is why they [Japanese firms] lay off foreign employees," said BNP Paribas consumer electronics analyst Masayuki Yonezawa.
Leading computer maker Fujitsu Ltd said it would slash 16,400 jobs worldwide, or 8.8 percent of its total workforce, by March 2002 -- 11,400 cuts will be made abroad mainly in the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
"The real problem is in Japan," said Scott Foster, electronics analyst at Leyman Brothers. "But Fujitsu went and made exactly the reverse decision by firing a large number of people overseas, with a large percentage coming from Southeast Asia where labor costs are lower.
"It won't bring Fujitsu a lot of savings."
Kyocera Corp, the world's largest maker of integrated circuit ceramic packages used in computers and mobile phones, made a similar mistake when it announced 10,000 global job cuts that exclude domestic staff, said analysts.
"The figure is larger than we had expected but it is all from abroad. This is because it is much harder to cut jobs in Japan," said BNP Paribas's Yonezawa.
Okasan Securities electronics analyst Kazumasa Kubota agreed: "Companies are simply laying people off [abroad] to protect their profits, but their restructuring plans are short-sighted and smack of a knee-jerk reaction to the bursting of the IT [information technology] bubble."
Late July, NEC Corp said it would shave 4,000 jobs off its global workforce of almost 150,000 this year, reduce semiconductor production at home and abroad and pull out of the DRAM chip business by 2004.
But Kubota said he was disappointed at the size of the scale-down, which reflects an inbuilt reluctance by Japanese companies to lay off staff.
"NEC will have to cut tens of thousands of jobs to endure the ongoing economic downturn," he said. "The demand for semiconductors is weakening ... even when companies cut prices, demand remains low."
Utter desperation at the demise of the global technology industry has finally driven some firms in Japan to compromise domestic employees for profit, but a lingering sense of social responsibility means most jobs will go through natural attrition rather than ruthless cuts here and now, said analysts.
Hitachi Ltd will erase 10,200 jobs at home and 4,500 abroad by March 2002, but most staff will leave of their own accord or through early retirement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained