We’ve been writing in previous blogs about the mistake that High Tech and Electronics (HT&E) companies would make if they fail to market to people in emerging economies. And we’ve written about how technology applications can overcome the difficulty of marketing to those audiences.
A story in the Wall Street Journal in October echoes these themes, discussing how Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard are “aggressively expanding their sales networks in China’s countryside, where over half of China’s population resides and broadband access is increasing.”
The story, “PC Makers Cultivate Buyers in Rural China,” notes that:
Though difficult to penetrate, China’s countryside is “probably still the world’s most promising market” in terms of the number of people “who’ve never owned a PC before, who would to like to own a PC and who have that capability,” says David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based marketing strategy firm.
So, the market in China and other places is huge and represents a green field of opportunity, possibly as many as four billion people worldwide. How can HT&E endeavor to capture this market?
We suggest that focusing on sales effectiveness will drive HT&E companies in the right direction. Sales effectiveness in our view comes about through enabling some tried and true operational processes through information technology:
o A unified collaborative workspace and corporate intranet that provides employees with an effective way to collaborate and form work teams, increase productivity and enable better information flows
o Integrated programs in a familiar environment that increase effectiveness among remote teams
o A secure working environment that prevents malevolence and intellectual property loss
We’ll talk more about improving these operational processes in future blogs. – Han Tiong Law
High Tech & Electronics who are keeping their eye on the ball of their underlying business should pay attention to a Wall Street Journal story that appeared in early July.
The story, “Why Companies See Bright Prospects in Rural India,” describes how international newspaper headlines focus inordinately on what happens in the corporate world, both in good times and bad. There’s a sort of near-sightedness that occurs around Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, while the more dynamic activity in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities is worthy of note:
In the villages and towns, it has been a very different picture. “The rural market is insulated from the global meltdown,” says Harish Bijoor, CEO of brand and business strategy consultants Harish Bjoor Consults. “The rural part of our economy has been untouched by credit cards and mortgages as known in the West.”
"The slowdown experienced by India on account of the IT (information technology), real estate, financial services and automobile sectors was an urban phenomenon," says Ajay Gupta, founder and CEO of ruralnaukri.com, which focuses on jobs in the rural sector. "However, the negative impact of all this on urban India has been more than offset by encouraging performance in rural areas. The rural economy has provided a cushion. Overall sentiment in the country was different from other parts of the world where each household had at least one person with a pink slip."
The point here is that many HT&E companies are looking to the developing countries to grow their market share, but the question is whether they are looking in the right place. Existing sales, marketing and service management (SMS) technologies might focus the HT&E companies on the homogenous and dense population centers of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, but not enable them to reach the Tier 3, 4 and 5 cities. Those cities diverse cultural attributes and scattered geographic locations make that difficult. That’s a mistake, and the Wall Street Journal piece explains why.
Indeed, HT&E companies need to look a the new capabilities of high performance sales networks that operate over the Cloud in order to harness next generation SMS and reach the full breadth of emerging economies. Next generation SMS using the Cloud will provide the HT&E enterprise with the scalable capabilities to reach the emerging markets, to be able to sell through tens of thousands of small networked partners that can reach emerging market customers. – Han Tiong Law
Perhaps this story caught your eye: earlier this month Anthony Zuiker, the creator of “CSI:Crime Scene Investigation,” a U.S. television show, announced that he will be releasing what he’s calling a “digi-novel.” This novel will combine three different media: a book, a movie, and a website. According to Zuiker, “The future of business in terms of entertainment will have to be the convergence of different mediums.”
Not so coincidentally, we are hearing increasingly from our High Tech and Electronics customers that they continue to seek out new business models. Changing consumer preferences and competitive pressures are driving our customers to move from their traditional ‘build and sell’ model to one where devices are combined with services to deliver a richer, more engaging experience.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to forecast what combination of products and services will become popular (and therefore profitable) and which will fail. I read recently that several years ago the telecommunications industry was gearing up for what they thought would be a multi-billion dollar market in broadcasting to mobile devices. The actual market size today is far smaller than forecast and likely millions of dollars were wasted by investing in this area.
So the question is, “How does a High Tech and Electronics company survive and even thrive in such an environment?”
Certainly, staying close to its customers is important. Web 2.0 capabilities provided by companies like Microsoft are gaining popularity because they can help predict rapid changes in consumer tastes, and therefore product success. Tying this information back to engineering/product development teams is critical too, as is tight integration with suppliers, in case things in the forecast change rapidly and new plans need to be made.
While collaboration among sales, marketing, manufacturing, product design, and supply chain teams has always been a desired end-state, the degree to which things are changing in the High Tech world converts such an objective from a “nice to have” to a “necessary to survive” status. And having the ability to extract the most meaningful KPIs from all these various operational groups and present them to executive management in a dashboard can change the decision making framework from “too little too late” to right on time.
Microsoft sees its customers increasingly using applications from its partners based on SharePoint and Unified Communications to provide just such collaboration. Even though companies are more dispersed than ever, they also face a business environment in which real time collaboration is an absolute requirement for survival, not to mention winning market share. - Craig Rode | Industry Technology Strategist, High Tech & Electronics - World Wide |
Few people noticed an announcement in February that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will help fund projects that enable poor mobile phone users to transfer money using handsets.
What was interesting about the announcement was that while many people in the Third World (and also many poor people in the developed countries) don’t have banking accounts, they do have need to participate in the financial system, whether that’s to pay their utility and phone bill or put gas in their vehicle and buy groceries. In addition to not having a lot of money to store away, the poor tend not to trust financial institutions with their money, preferring cash or other real assets as stores of wealth.
Regardless, the Gates Foundation announcement indicates that there is awareness that people in emerging economies do value their mobile phones and companies can use those phones to engage in short message service (SMS) programs that reach previously inaccessible markets.
In fact High Tech & Electronic (HT&E) companies have an opportunity to take an innovative approach to reaching people in emerging markets with another type of SMS -- sales, marketing, and service management -- technology. We like to refer to SMS as the latter (sales, marketing and service management) and not short message services. The acronyms are confusing and we’ll do our best to make them clear when we blog about them.
Emerging countries offer high growth environments, characterized by strong economic foundations, large populations and high levels of urbanization. Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) make up 2.7 billion people and have a combined GDP of $3 trillion, with $230 billion in information and communications technology (ICT) spend. These countries have secured their position as bases of broad-based growth because of their advanced ICT markets, established IT infrastructure, high info-density, heightened government ICT support and IP protection.
As such, High Tech & Electronic (HT&E) enterprises need new capabilities in next generation sales, marketing and service management technologies to reach emerging economies, in Tier 1 & 2 cities as well as Tier 3-5 and other cities in BRIC countries. These capabilities include a mega contact center, a sales network, marketing for the masses, services and support network, customer and partner relationship management, networked customer logistics as well as next generation B2B and order management.
The companies who are sensitive to these possibilities will be the next leaders when the global economic upturn occurs. – Han Tiong Law, Market Development Director, Asia Pacific High Tech & Electronics Industry
Worldwide, national policymakers are requiring companies to clean up their environmental footprints and otherwise comply with a range of regulations around health and safety. High tech and electronics industry companies in turn are evaluating how technology initiatives can address these governmental concerns.
Microsoft IT Showcase has recently published Microsoft IT Streamlines Regulatory Compliance, ![clip_image002[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/hightechandelectronics/WindowsLiveWriter/MicrosoftOffersApproachtoRegulatoryCompl_E7B7/clip_image002%5B1%5D_6840e11d-346e-403b-886e-937ca40df07d.jpg "clip_image002[1]")
which discusses how Microsoft IT uses a holistic approach to address the ever-increasing complexity of regulatory compliance. This continually evolving system combines different regulatory frameworks into a single overarching process, and uses standardized tools to test similar controls. By combining tools and using a clearly defined role-based accountability model, Microsoft IT streamlines business processes, reduces duplication of effort, and makes business units more operationally efficient. Read the Technical Case Study here and be sure to come back to us with any questions on how this might work with your HT&E company.
Maintaining research and development spending during economic downturns seems to be a key theme of various press and research reports out in recent weeks but to us maintaining or reducing such investments isn’t really the question.
The better question is how to improve the quality and impact of R&D spending through collaborative processes that identify and formulate innovation of new products or improve innovative workflows.
Take for example the Wall Street Journal story “R&D Spending Holds Steady in Slump”
Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S. companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier, even as their revenue fell 7.7%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis….
Overall spending by the 28 companies nudged down 0.7% in the quarter. Among those keeping up R&D funding is Microsoft Corp., which spent 21% more in the fourth quarter over the year-earlier period…. Intel Corp., which posted a 90% drop in fourth-quarter net income, plans to spend $5.4 billion on R&D this year, down slightly from last year, plus $7 billion in the next two years to modernize its plants. 3M Co., maker of Scotch tape, Post-it notes and other products, has laid off 4,700 workers in the past 15 months and will cut capital expenditure 30% this year, but it expects R&D spending to stay flat or increase slightly.
"We are looking at really protecting R&D," says Lisa Su, chief technology officer of Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The chip maker's fourth-quarter revenue fell almost 40%, but R&D spending fell only 6%. "That's what's going to drive growth coming out of the downturn."
BusinessWeek magazine offers a great video on R&D, where some reporters performed a screen of companies that invested in R&D during the last recession and found their stock performance benefited greatly in the following upturn. Bizweek reporter Tara Kalwarksi deserves kudos for their research.
And finally, in the February McKinsey Quarterly, authors Christie Barrett, Christopher Musso and Asutosh Padhii wrote a story, “Upgrading R&D in a downturn” where they emphasize improving the quality of R&D spending:
Companies should take a more strategic approach to cutting R&D costs, by using today’s difficult economic environment as an opportunity to upgrade the R&D organization’s focus, practices, and management. That path helps companies not only to cut their costs but also to raise productivity and speed up time to market—while positioning themselves for even greater success in the future.
Microsoft is very focused on R&D improvements, especially in the area of innovation management. High tech and electronics (HT&E) companies compete in the fastest-moving industry in the world, where customer tastes change overnight, new technologies emerge unexpectedly, and competition can appear out of nowhere. HT&E companies rely on innovation for their survival. While high tech companies may place a high priority on being innovative, most feel that their results don't measure up.
Microsoft has focused on delivering a software framework that maximizes R&D expenditures. The framework helps companies unleash the power of the collaboration within the organization, so that no matter where employees are located, they can have that proverbial “OneTeam” approach to adding value.
The framework helps high tech and electronic companies measure ideas against corporate strategic drivers and then communicates those drivers throughout the enterprise so that collaborating employees know what they are and can contribute accordingly.
For instance, scorecards let employees see how their company is performing against its preset innovation goals, which ideas are contributing to innovation and which areas need attention. The framework also allows companies to gather ideas from every level of the organization so that ideas can be viewed, prioritized, evaluated and promoted, if appropriate. The framework allows changes in conditions, corporate priorities or customer preferences to be taken into account instantly so that priorities can be identified.
As a high tech manufacturer of the Xbox® 360, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices business group employs some 7,000 employees for the development, production, and marketing of the video system, other entertainment and learning products and hardware devices. To customize and streamline workflow on development and production of nearly 13 million consoles, each with more than 1,000 parts, Microsoft’s E&D group developed an Office Business Application on the 2007 Microsoft Office system to connect 140 business activities in a custom workflow solution that provided improved data access, tracking and analysis. The benefits were more accurate, timely business reports; improved views of data and workflow; seamless integration between user interface and required tasks, data, and applications; better-informed business decisions; flexible solution to meet evolving requirements; and improved developer productivity. The complete case study is located here.
There’s so much more on improving R&D and innovation that we’ll be revisiting this topic in future blogs. – Sanjay Ravi
Guest blog from Dave Lassiter, Director of Manufacturing Industry Solutions for Microsoft.
The current economy is certainly challenging all of us to do more with less. As supply chain professionals, how often in the last year have you heard, “Cut costs, downsize your workforce, reduce procurement costs, and scale back inventory, and do it all without impacting revenues or customer service? Sound familiar?
We hear from our customers again and again that they need to quickly improve their supply chain performance. However, customers with large ERP and legacy system investments have difficulty responding to critical business initiatives in a timely and cost-effective fashion. These projects can take 9 to 12 months and cost over a million dollars. No supply chain executive or CIO who values his or her job would dare take this traditional mega-IT project to the CEO for approval in this market.
Without this “Big IT’ project option, line of business executives and IT executives scramble to find niche solutions to get them what they think they need quickly and at a perceived low cost. However, these niche solutions further complicate the customer’s already complex and expensive Information Technology infrastructure. Now, “legions” of highly compensated consultants often are required to manipulate these systems for a “business transformation” project that will now cost millions of dollars and take years to implement. So what are they to do?
Microsoft has built products and solutions that are easy to use, quick to deploy, simple to maintain, leveraging existing investments. For example, one of our fastest growing enterprise products is SharePoint. SharePoint provides a proven, low cost, intuitive, easy to use collaboration and Web 2.0 desktop work place for employees. Most companies already own many or all of these capabilities and are beginning to leverage this desktop for deploying "role-based" dashboards for performance management and streamlined, simplified, lean business processes.
Having such a platform in place can be particularly useful when a customer needs to quickly deploy a new business process to improve performance, to achieve cost savings, or meet revenue growth goals. The great part about this platform is that most companies already own many or all of its elements and are beginning to leverage this Microsoft platform for deploying "role-based" dashboards for performance management and streamlined, simplified, lean, “real-time” business processes.
So, what does this platform have to do with helping our supply chain executive and CIO out of their “do more with less” dilemma? Let me tell you about a customer I personally worked with to help get a solution like this in place:
One customer with over $1 Billion spend annually on direct materials had buyers who spent a large portion of their day searching 24 separate screens in their standard ERP solution for the information they needed to process a routine purchase order for direct materials. This included looking at supplier, material, quality, and other records in the ERP system. One of the top 3 business initiatives of this customer was to reduce raw material costs. The customer was also under pressure to significantly reduce their overall Information Technology budget. The customer had both ERP and Microsoft capabilities to take advantage of to improve their business processes. The customer needed a "low-cost" quick time to value solution which allowed their buyers to more quickly process purchase orders and have the “real-time” visibility needed to reduce purchase price variance.
The Vice President Supply Chain had hard dollar cost savings targets that were going to be very difficult to meet without a simplified business process and KPI's to track performance improvement. A Six Sigma team identified what the "role-based" dashboard needed to look like to implement a lean business process. The customer selected Microsoft SharePoint versus typical options other customer might use like: (1) a custom ERP development effort; (2) purchase and roll out of the SRM ERP module; or (3) purchase of a SRM module from another vendor. The customer now has a project underway to deploy a "Buyer Workbench" using the Microsoft platform with a 12 week implementation plan for a production roll out seamlessly integrated with their ERP system of record. The customer already owned the Microsoft licenses so the only costs for this project were the time of the internal project team and the supporting Microsoft Global System Integrator partner services. This customer has also selected Microsoft for their enterprise Business Intelligence solution on top of ERP and other legacy systems. They are now able to role these capabilities out to their employees across various functional areas providing a simple, intuitive “role-based” dashboard for their role in the organization.
One of Microsoft’s key Global Alliance partners, Infosys, has created a “role-based” performance management workbench offerings (Supply Chain Visibility) that can easily connect to a customer’s legacy systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to enable “real-time” exception based Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Infosys has created these “Role-Based” desktops for various functional roles in an organization such as Procurement, Manufacturing, Materials Management, and Service Management. Infosys was selected to provide the "Buyer Workbench" mentioned in the paragraph above. Infosys has developed an offering which allows customers to get a "fast start" on a project to support their key business initiatives in streamlining work processes and improving "real-time" exception based performance management. This includes a data model, best practice KPI’s, templates, reports, and dashboards.
I am seeing a large pick up in these kind of “quick hit” projects with our customers. The biggest challenge Microsoft faces right now is helping customers become more aware of how they can leverage these capabilities that they typically already "own." I talked to a Chief Information Officer at the recent AMR Supply Chain Executive Conference; he was considering looking at an ERP solution for pricing analytics and procurement. These were two key business initiatives at his Company. He was not aware Microsoft partners like Infosys had solutions in the same space. He was very pleased to find out there were Microsoft based solutions since they run a tight ship and can’t afford multi-million ERP based software and services projects.
On June 9th, Infosys, Microsoft and AMR Research will present a Webinar to discuss how organizations can harness the value of their supply chain data towards improved performance using visibility and collaboration. This session will be recorded, and I will be providing a link to the recording shortly after the webcast. – Dave Lassiter, Microsoft
Hello, I’m Craig Rode and I’m the Industry Technology Strategist for the Microsoft World Wide High Tech and Electronics group. In this role, I help bring together technology and partners which provide solutions for our customers in High Tech. I’ve been involved in High Tech for over 30 years, in a variety of roles spanning development, product management, marketing, and sales. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008 I was the VP of North American Sales Operations for CoCreate, (now acquired by PTC), a supplier of PLM tools to leading high tech manufacturers.
Years ago High Tech and Electronics (HT&E) companies began offshoring their manufacturing work to lower cost parts of the world to leverage lower labor costs. In some cases, they contracted with other companies to make their products or components. In others, they opened up facilities themselves. In both cases, the cost savings HT&E companies realized were tremendous despite the fact that they had to add IT and technical infrastructure costs to manage the projects. Today though, a similar move of the engineering task offshore is not going as smoothly and needs new solutions.
Sending the engineering function offshore makes a lot of sense. Design engineers really need to understand the manufacturing impacts of the design decisions that they make. Getting feedback from the shop floor is critical to the design engineer who needs to create products which can be manufactured at the lowest possible cost. And, for a lot of companies, enabling local engineering means that they can design products with local markets in mind. That’s key to attaining competitive advantages and market share in emerging markets. Finally, engineering can be less expensive in emerging markets.
Today, it is very common to find companies based in the US, EMEA, and Japan whose engineering resources are distributed worldwide. The problem? As engineering becomes decentralized and more dispersed, it becomes harder to manage, and collaboration becomes more difficult. The money saved because of lower labor rates may be lost if it is spent by flying personnel to and fro for project status review meetings.
Further, the distribution of intellectual property (IP) outside the walls of the engineering department creates new issues. HT&E companies’ survival depends on ensuring that their current and future product designs remain secure. This becomes increasing difficult to manage as engineering is more widely distributed. In addition, much of the information contained in US companies’ engineering databases are regulated by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which states that access to certain types of product design information must be controlled to prevent citizens of certain countries from accessing it.
In fact, one company I worked with had its entire engineering system shut down by its own internal IT auditors until it could get those controls in place. Luckily, we were able to get them in compliance within a couple of working days.
When I was selling product lifecycle management solutions, one of my customers was a large California-based equipment maker that has engineering teams working together on their complex high tech products. These teams are located across the world with presence in Canada, US, EMEA, and Asia. Engineers from these teams work together on the same engineering models. This company relies heavily on CoCreate Model Manager from Microsoft partner PTC to coordinate their activities and manage the information to deliver high quality products in the shortest amount of time possible.
Microsoft’s collaboration-enabling solutions, like Microsoft Office Sharepoint® Server and Unified Communications can and have been applied in situations like this. Moreover, there is huge potential for cloud computing (Azure) because some of the countries where this work is being performed (like China, Vietnam, Malaysia) don’t have the IT infrastructure or the internet “pipes” to have real-time collaboration that requires fast, continuous connection. Total cost of ownership, Microsoft familiarity and ease of use, have made these effective solutions for companies that have offshored their engineering processes.
In our last blog we noted that several high tech and electronics (HTE) company executives attending the Global Economic forum said they are placing a premium on gaining greater visibility into what is going with suppliers, customers and 
worldwide operations. The executives’ pain points varied by company, industry and geo
graphy, but all in all they validated the findings of a KRC Research-conducted survey that Microsoft and Infosys published in January.
Among the key findings:
We could go on about the survey results but you get the picture. A press release is posted here and the full survey findings are here. We’ll come back to these results in detail in future blogs.
High tech supply chain management is a highly complex endeavor, where you have to deal with managing a constantly changing, and highly uncertain global business environment, where rapid decision making is critical for long-term success.. We recently published a case study about Samsung Electronics efforts to strengthen its ability to manage its global supply chain, particularly for the purpose of preparing for the uncertainties in the high tech business environment and drive Samsung’s competitiveness.
Samsung worked with Microsoft to create an action-oriented role-based productivity solution that enables simulation and on-demand changes of business management plans leveraging cube write-back capabilities, and empower people to make these adjustments by using a user interface that is “employee-familiar”. Samsung Electronics deployed a Role-Based Productivity solution from Microsoft built on SQL Server®, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
The company expects its forecast accuracy for product demands to improve some 20%, which is significant when event a 1% increase in demand forecast accuracy can lead to substantial cost reduction in raw materials, logistics and production tasks. The company is expecting a 1000% ROI with enhanced demand forecast accuracy.
For those high tech and electronics companies with other supply chain challenges, our solutions are built upon core Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server ,Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server. We’ll be talking more about how these solutions provide Supply Chain visibility and collaboration in future blogs as well.
For a more thorough discussion of Microsoft in Supply Chain Management, see the HTE supply chain solution page on our Website and also a specific solution brief. Again, we’ll discuss these in more detail in future blogs.
-Sanjay Ravi
In early March, we attended the annual Global Electronics forum and came away with a number of great insights into how top-tier high tech and electronics (HTE) companies are looking to survive this recession and then thrive in the next upturn, when it comes.
Just to give you a sampling of who was there and what they talked about, Dell’s Paul Prince, the CTO for enterprise systems, led a presentation on “Coupling Hardware and Silicone Design for More Powerful software Enablement,” and Johan Van de Ven, a senior vice president for Philips Consumer Lifestyle, led a panel on the “Thoughts on Next Steps in the Ongoing Digital Revolution of Consumer Electronics” There are too many other great presentations to cover here – just know they were all excellent.
As we heard these presentations as well as feedback from the panel discussion about the Global Electronics Industry – with executives from austriamicrosystems, Celestica, Dell, Fairchild, IBM, Philips and McLaren Electronic Systems – some clear themes about our current worldwide economic environment came to the fore.
First, worldwide high tech and electronics companies are viewing today’s markets as uncertain and unpredictable and this is causing tremendous difficulties for all organizations to plan and forecast. In this environment, companies are placing a premium on gaining the ability to have greater visibility of what is going on, whether that’s with their customers, suppliers or worldwide operations. They want to reduce the dysfunction that’s produced by silos within their operations and in interactions with outsiders. Anything that can reduce the latency of decisions is of high value to the organization grappling with the rapid fire pace of change now occurring.
Secondly, reducing costs across the operational value chain is a high priority activity at all HTE companies. Consumer demand for the entire range of digital/electronic products continues to be softening or declining at a rapid pace, leading to price erosions and thinner margins. Any operational improvements that reduce costs help counter these trends.
Thirdly, the time to work toward gaining market share with new or improved products is now. Most of the companies continue to maintain their investments on Innovation, as well as drive increased levels of customer intimacy, especially in these tough times. Companies that can take market share through well placed product offerings, and differentiated customer service, stand to gain the most when the upturn occurs.
A recently released McKinsey research confirms that insight: “About half of the companies that entered these downturns as leaders—the top 20 percent—ended up as laggards when the economy regained momentum.” Interestingly, the laggards were companies that cut employees and other SG&A expenses. And leaders in the upturn tended to be those that engaged in high levels of acquisition, according to McKinsey.
Clearly, McKinsey’s findings offer real imperatives to do what it takes to make continued investments in the growth of your HTE company and work to identify future trends. Whether that’s improved management or new technology adaptations, there’s room for improvements and investments for the next up cycle.
We are going to focus future blog entries on our views of how companies can make implement recession-beating practices and work toward emerging as a leader once the downturn recedes.
-Sanjay Ravi
The Microsoft High Tech and Electronics Industry team will be providing you with thought-provoking observations and perspectives about the trends, developments and challenges faced by the high tech and electronics (HTE) manufacturing industry. As a provider of software solutions, we will offer our own views on how those challenges might be approached and solved.
Unfortunately, those challenges keep piling up as uncertain and unsettling winds buffet the industry.
Some quick examples should suffice: Semiconductor maker Qimonda recently announced insolvency and is in Munich district court for restructuring proceedings. Intel chairman Craig Barrett was recently characterized by the EE Times as “being in the dark” about when the semiconductor market will recover. Dell continues its restructuring with layoffs and factory reductions, while positioning itself for recovery through new partnerships. Samsung Electronics asked employees to reduce their pay by taking one unpaid day off per month in an effort to save millions in operating costs.
But all is not lost and despite the dire headlines there should be great hope about the future. At some point worldwide recovery will occur and those companies that positioned themselves for recovery will come out big winners, just as they have after previous downturns.
This blog then will discuss what companies are doing to survive now and thrive later. Since most high tech and electronics manufacturers use Microsoft software, and since Microsoft is itself a high tech manufacturer, we believe Microsoft’s experience, know-how and products can be beneficial in explaining what is going on and where the next waves of growth will originate.
At the same time, we want to reassure our readers that the primary focus of this blog is to talk about industry issues and trends! We will explain Microsoft’s approach to addressing the challenges in the industry and will always strive to be informative.
Our goal is to offer thoughts about how HTE manufacturers can use technology to improve time-to-market, innovation, cost efficiencies, and business processes while adding to the bottom line. We will provide our views on how HTE manufacturers can compete in a constantly changing environment brought on by insatiable consumer demand for the latest-greatest. We know that demand will reappear and drive high tech and electronic manufacturing. This blog will demonstrate how Microsoft is already helping semiconductor and OEM manufacturers change the way their people work, through the comprehensive software solutions that make them successful. Along the way, we are playing a part in changing how the HTE manufacturing industry works.
Trust me – we already have plenty to write about. Our recently revamped High Tech & Electronics website offers case studies, customer videos and solution information sheets, along with high level explanations of our solution sets. Dig in. The website already offers a wealth of information about how we and our partners are helping HTE companies become more successful, but this blog will go even further. 
And we would really appreciate and encourage any feedback you wish to provide. Please feel free to comment on this blog or send me your suggestions and ideas. We hope you’ll enjoy this blog.
Sanjay Ravi
Managing Director
Worldwide High Tech & Electronics Industry
Microsoft Corp
sanrav@microsoft.com
