Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Kodak moves production to Singapore

In a bid to "streamline" business and "boost profits" Kodak is moving it's consumer camera production to Flextronics, a company from Singapore. In my books, whenever streamlining is mentioned in business news, it means lots of job axing (as the article in the link below shows). It's a more refined way of saying it. It also means, "we're moving things to a place where we pay less for a workforce".

So it's not a surprise that Flextronics was the chosen company. Flextronics, has as it's aim "low cost, high volume manufacturing solutions" which translates to Kodak right now as,"we can sit over here and throw peanuts because there is someone on the other end that will take them". In the meantime, 27000 jobs are gone which I am pretty sure they don't mean the Research and Development Dept (when was the last time we have seen real innovation from Kodak), Design Department (Kodak cameras really need some serious plastic surgery), Marketing Dept.(they are always among the first to point the finger when things don't sell). I am pretty sure the ones to go first will be the people in the assembly lines.

Don't get me wrong, I think Kodak DSLR's produce good image quality but they are past waters and they never really took off. Design wise they were heavy and not very ergonomic (I don't mind the heavy bit personally),they were slow, processing the images from them was according to their users slow and also you weren't advised to use higher ISOs due to noise.All these are things that have little to do with the guy or gal in the assembly line.

The main reason why I am having a rant, is that a lot of companies are doing this either they really need it or not, to a certain level. And the use of terms like "streamlining" to say they are laying off people in their thousands just irritates me. In fact in Kodak's case if anything that needed streamlining is the design of their cameras.

Anyway, here's the article:

Kodak farms out to Singapore


Until next time,



Luis

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