
Lenovo Is Laying Off 3,200 - ghosh
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/12/lenovo-is-laying-off-3200-staff-after-a-poor-quarter-of-business/
======
mike-cardwell
"laying off 3,200 employees"

"in a move that should trim its wage bill by an estimated $1.35 billion per
year."

$1,350,000,000 / 3,200 = $421,875

I need a payrise.

~~~
thecopy
I don't know if it is different were Lenovo operates, bu there in Sweden if i
get 100 in salary, the company has a cost of 200 because of social taxes,
employment tax etc.. I guess also HR will have less to do, which contributes
to the cost-save.

~~~
leogiertz
I'm not sure you can count what you get after taxes as salary, your personal
taxes is normally considered part of your salary.

The "arbetsgivaravgift" (i.e. taxes that your employer pays) is about 30% of
your salary, so if you're going to get a salary of 100 that costs your
employer about 130. The cash you get in hand varies depending on your personal
tax rate, but normally you would receive between 50 and 70.

Edit: This is for Sweden. YMMV. :)

~~~
iofj
Very true. There is a legal standard for "gross" pay which is not gross pay at
all. In Northern countries gross pay is ~20-35% lower than the employer pays,
and after that the employee also pays 40-55% on the "gross" amount after that.

(Example "non-gross" income tax: patronal national insurance tax, corporation
closure insurance tax, tax on vacation pay, tax for employment of permanently
disabled persons, ... It totals ~18% in Germany, up to 38.5% in Belgium,
depending on the sector (specific sectors have specific taxes - yes really))

These sorts of measures make sure that taxation is a lot less visible for
"normal" people (ie. voters) in Europe than it is in America. Employers have
to advertise "net pay", which is the amount you generally negotiate for. Also,
for instance, the prices displayed in stores have to be tax-inclusive (there's
a VAT of 18-25% as well), the prices displayed at the pump include all taxes
(not just VAT), tobacco and alcohol have to be advertised with prices
including all taxes.

That means a European kid might very well not hear the word "tax" until
they're 24-25 and get a real, first job, and will likely think they're only
paying an income tax of 40-55%, when in fact they are paying a tax of 1/1.20
_0.6_ 0.82 = 61% (and up to 76%) (money that they can spend divided by money
that is paid for their labour, inverted). And that still doesn't include
property tax, car tax, and the like.

------
dothis
Hopefully those who injected spyware into the bios are among them:

[http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=dd...](http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014#p29497693)

~~~
jakub_g
The forum thread made it into a full article on Ars (which is a good summary)
as someone points out later in the thread

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/08/lenovo...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-
persistent-crapware/)

~~~
javert
Wow. This is a big deal I hadn't heard of.

Coming after Superfish, this is totally unacceptable.

Leonovo is working REALLY REALLY hard to lose loyal technical customers.

Imagine doing a clean install and still finding crapware installed on your
laptop. Unbelievable.

~~~
joshuapants
> Leonovo is working REALLY REALLY hard to lose loyal technical customers.

They already lost me after Superfish, but now with this instead of passively
not buying I'm going to actively recommend that others not. It's absolutely
unacceptable.

~~~
javert
Problem is, the only decent quality machines I've ever had have been
ThinkPads. I'm afraid of paying big money for a high-end machine from some
other brand and having it turn out to be somewhat of a lemon.

Of course there is always Apple, which has consistently high quality, but I
prefer to run Linux, so that's out.

------
Tharkun
Hopefully their keyboard designers are among them.

~~~
nomailing
And touchpad designers too. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga and the Touchpad is
unusable. It has this mechanic click where the full touchpad lowers down, and
while it is doing this the mouse moves slightly. Therefore it is hard to click
precisely on something if during the click the mouse is moving. They probably
never tested this before deciding to put this into a thinkpad or they tested
it and nobody cared to hear what the testers said...

~~~
sergiosgc
Worse. They market tested it on their best laptop (the X1 Carbon). It flunked
on the market, with the 2nd gen X1 receiving appalling reviews. The 3rd
generation X1 Carbon reverted to the old touchpad and its marvelous Thinkpad
mouse buttons.

------
andrzejsz
I only hope it doesnt push them even more to destroying thinkpad brand
although there are some encouraging signs as shown in the release thinkpad p
info

~~~
mike-cardwell
In my eyes, they've already destroyed their brand by selling Thinkpads with
BIOS's which automatically compromise clean Windows installs by overwriting
files at boot time. That and the fact they sold Thinkpads containing software
which compromised all HTTPS traffic (Superfish).

Speaking as somebody who's current laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad and who has had
three other Thinkpads in the past: This will be my last.

~~~
ekianjo
That was not on thinkpads.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I didn't realise that. Ultimately makes no difference though. They've proven
they can't be trusted to produce computers which are safe to use.

------
pjmlp
> Lenovo reported revenue of $10.7 billion, up three percent on the same
> period last year

And yet they fire people.

I really hate these MBAs with the politic that "Oh well we didn't achieved our
continuous growth, let's sack some people".

Back in the day, companies would be happy to have any profit at all.

EDIT: Being downvoted by MBAs it seems.

~~~
pathy
Revenue and profit are two very different things.

Their quarterly profit was just $105m so it isn't exactly a high margin
business. That number was a 51% drop compared to the same quarter last year.
[0]

It is hardly surprising that they want to shed staff if the profit dropped
that much. Nor was the 3% revenue increase anything spectacular.

[0]
[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33900230](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33900230)

~~~
pjmlp
It was still a profit, that is my point and your reply just sounds the typical
MBA stuff I was mentioning.

A business is sound if it can pay its employees and running expenses with a
little savings on the side, not trying to achieve increase multiplication
factors in profit.

~~~
pathy
A very small profit in decline, if they do nothing about it they are likely to
go into the red, which will end up causing even more lay-offs.

Even historically business have been motivated by profit and increasing said
profit. This is nothing new and certainly has nothing to do with MBAs. No
private (i.e. not state run) business has ANY obligation to employ more people
than they need/want just for the sake of it.

~~~
iofj
The problem with such "MBAs" is that always the answer is to eat the seed
corn, making the problem worse.

If Lenovo is to grow out of this, it will have to do it with the manufacturing
and design/IT departments. Yet a voice within me seems to be very certain that
these departments are going to find themselves cut down far more than the
sales and general management departments. At one company, when this happened,
they actually increased sales commissions while cutting engineering jobs. At
that point, you know it's time to get out. Out of the company's stock,
primarily.

IBM is the prime example of this attitude.

