By Lloyd Graff Today’s Machining World Archives November/December 2010 Volume 06 Issue 09 With GM going public and bringing back billions to the taxpayers, we are seeing a batch of revisionist opinion pieces about Rick Wagoner, former head of the auto giant. Malcolm Gladwell, a favorite writer of mine, wrote a fascinating review of Steven Rattner’s new book, Overhaul, about the restructuring of GM for the Obama Administration. Rattner is a Wall Street mover and shaker who headed the restructuring in Detroit. Rattner saw Wagoner as a bureaucratic company guy and ultimately fired him, bringing in crusty Ed Whitacre to…
Author: Lloyd Graff
After the blog about Today’s Machining World’s Real Deal (“The Groupon For the Machining World”) appeared Tuesday, I had a call from Cathy Bothe of Signature Needle Arts which Today’s Machining World did a cover story on a year ago. Cathy was ebullient about the knitting needle business, which she says is growing more than 100 percent per month. She feels the Groupon/Real Deal approach is a viable concept for the machining world, but with a twist. One of her ideas is that a machine setup could be discounted, the other idea is that the first 100 hours of runtime…
Maybe if you are living under a rock you haven’t heard of GROUPON™. But this two-year-old company just had the chutzpa to reject Google’s $6 billion offer to acquire it. So what do they do? They sell coupons for goods and services on the Internet with good writing, a sense of humor, and a cool concept—the deals have a limited time frame and a minimum number of people need to take them before they kick in. Noah Graff and I heard Andrew Mason, the 29-year-old founder of GROUPON™, at a Wall Street Journal forum on growing your business. We were…
For the last nine years I have bought the best dried apricots in the world from Gibson Farms of Hollister, California. I met one of the owners, Mr. Gilbert Gibson, at the Palo Alto Farmer’s Market and we have become business friends. He asks me about my family; I ask him about the crop. He suggests I buy some walnuts; I usually just want the sweetest dried apricots I’ve ever tasted. I always seem to run out of this perfect treat before my trips to the Bay Area, so I order them. No Web site. Just call the house and…
If you want a dose of machining today go directly to the ads, because I’m mad and I just can’t take it anymore. In a couple of days we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, watch the NFL, sop our dressing, and try to sleep with reflux. But 10,000 miles away thousands of American men and women will be trying to stay alive in Afghanistan. Tell me, why? We are propping up a corrupt Karzai government, playing ball with a Pakistan that harbors Al Qaeda, and inflating our monstrous budget deficit, to accomplish what? I don’t care if you are a lefty or a…
With GM going public today and bringing back billions to the taxpayers, we are seeing a batch of revisionist opinion pieces about Rick Wagoner, former head of the auto giant. Malcolm Gladwell, a favorite writer of mine, wrote a fascinating review of Steven Rattner’s new book, Overhaul, about the restructuring of GM for the Obama Administration. Rattner is a Wall Street mover and shaker who headed the restructuring in Detroit. Rattner saw Wagoner as a bureaucratic company guy and ultimately fired him, bringing in crusty Ed Whitacre to oversee the saving of a big part of the American auto industry.…
We are seeing an acceleration of year end buying in machinery for both new and used equipment. One reason for this is the widespread business expectation that prices for new machine tool inventory ordered from Japan will reflect the 25 percent drop in the past year of the value of the U.S. dollar versus the Japanese yen. The Japanese importers generally erred on the conservative side when 2010 orders were placed, which means the cupboards are now relatively bare. I’m hearing that 10 percent to 13 percent price increases are coming on Japanese built equipment, indicating that the builders hedged…
One of my abiding lifetime fascinations has been under-standing how markets value things. My father raised me on stories about buying machines at low prices and selling them at higher ones. I’ve been titillated by the stock market since childhood as I’ve tried to grasp the mystery of the shifting values of equities. Recently our new accountants leaned on us to do a comprehensive inventory of our stuff so they would feel secure about the values ascribed to our inventory in case the IRS came to visit. So we counted every screw and shaft (well, give or take a few)…
The mood has changed in the last few weeks in the precision machining world. It became real to me as I talked to folks at the Asset Sales auction at Caire Medical in Indianapolis last Thursday. The people of the machining world are happy again. They have a bit of visibility about orders. Washington has been neutered. Tax breaks are out there to shield income. Free cash flow is increasing. The dollar is weak and interest rates are low. The banks may be Scroogy, but just about everything else looks good. I see people rushing to get the last of…
I attended the auction of Caire Medical’s surplus machinery Nov. 4, in Indianapolis. The auctioneer, Asset Sales Inc. of Indian Trail, North Carolina, had a financial interest in the sale. There was an 18% buyer’s premium tacked onto the bid prices. The equipment was superb and the bidding was spirited. The hottest piece in the sale was a Citizen M32 Type V, new in 2007, with a FMB barloader. The bid price was $262,500 plus 18%, taking it over $300,000. There were (2) M32 Type III machines (new in 2003) which fetched $160,000 and $140,000 plus BP. An A-16 VIP…