Word: costs
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...Patrick Pichette, is leading the company's belt-tightening. A former executive at Bell Canada, his impact was already evident in the firm's third-quarter results, which it announced in October. Although the company's revenue was slightly lower than analyst estimates, earnings were higher due to cost-cutting measures spearheaded by Pichette, such as decreasing the number of new hires. "Google has certainly gotten religion on expenses, and that is due largely to the new CFO," says Sanford Bernstein's Lindsay...
...participate or don't set aside enough money to give them a shot at a comfortable retirement. Those who do save enough often bungle their investment choices. Those who choose well pay higher investment fees generally than pension funds do. Even participants in the best-run, lowest-cost retirement funds face the risk that the market will tank - as it has done this year - when they're close to retirement. At retirement comes another issue: pensions insure against the risk that you'll outlive your money, because they pay until you die; 401(k)s don't. And finally...
...Resizing the business will alter the number of nameplates that the Detroit Three market and the number of dealers that sell them. GM will sell or close Saturn. Pontiac and Saab could end up joining Oldsmobile and Plymouth in the hood-ornament graveyard because the cost of supporting a brand with a small market share doesn't make sense, nor does maintaining a dealership network created for an era when Chevy and Buick could support separate distribution systems. GM plans to reduce its dealer count 27%, to 4,700. "Certainly, having seven or eight brands for 25% of the market...
...That's close to the $49 an hour that workers at the transplants average and far below the $71 an hour with benefits that was the old UAW wage, and that was cited by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as a reason to oppose any bailout. And the cost differential on enginemaking between Detroit and the transplants will narrow to a couple of dollars by 2011. "You want to just choke these guys [in Congress] and take them through the 60 plants that I've been through and see what I've seen," says Harbour...
...engineering. No single manager can ever understand it. "Figuring out products, markets, customers, designs, systems - what's inherent about anything complex is that it becomes impossible. You can't design it perfectly," he says. What matters, he argues, is swarming problems from every direction to create high-speed, low-cost discovery and learning. And when you extend that open approach to suppliers, the path to lower-cost, better-functioning parts becomes easier...