AGFA victim of greedy crooks

U Agfa was a lot more than film said:
The worst of all is the fact that AGFA was on a good way to survive the digital age , the printer technology was top , they had developed printers able to print up to 20.000 prints an hour and minilabs, which were good enuff to get sold as Kodak and Fuji machines too.

Nonetheless the AGFA Gevaert board in Belgium found that biz beeing somehow to risky anyway and sold it to an investor group led by Hartmut Emans, a former McKinsey consultant. who immediately realized the worth of these assets and who tried to get it for nothing in times of a general digital hystery. And he was succesful, he got it for VERY cheap money and so it was to expect that he would try to sell it or better the core biz of it for it's true worth. To come there he had to get rid of the people first.

When I heard in 2004 that one of those McKinsey gangsters had bought AGFA Photo I already supposed the story to end like it ends now. Because those strategies are THEIR core business. Cut the fillet assets out and throw the rest away.
All this has nothing to do with a liberal economy or with stockholder's value politics, it's the opposite, plain economic parasitism.
That's a destructive way of making profits but we need constructive strategies here in Europe. A productive and healthy company is not a toy for some rich gamblers whic are too stupid to invest their money in new markets and products.

Best regards,
Bertram
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I generally do not know how I feel about that generalization, but I do like the term, "economic parasitism". I hope it catches on in this climate of manufacturing plant closings and pension defaults.
 
IMHO, Generation X and below have had enough of this rampant capitalism and effective fuedalism by a rich elite, and evidently, so have the poor people in developing countries.

Of course you can regulate corporations into being good citizens, we put bad citizens in jail.. anyways they should never have been given the rights of the Citizen in the first place, since corporations have no conscience and as you say, must serve shareholders first.

Sounds like greed to me..

Daniel.

PS. And for anybody who wants to argue otherwise, what gives one man, no matter how successfull, the right to destroy a thousand families for his personal gain?
 
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Then I'm guessing you don't want to read "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand? Just kidding!

Just trying to keep it light here, folks. I know there are some strong feelings about this - here in the US, we're pretty used to companies laying off workers - looks like GM is going to let 25,000 go very soon now. Life goes on, mostly.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks
 
AgfaPhoto

AgfaPhoto

I am currently engaged in legal proceedings with Agfa and it would greatly help our cause if anyone could supply me with information regarding the sale of AgfaPhoto from its parent company, Agfa-Gevaert, or with any information regarding the labor law suits that have recently taken place. I am looking for information, but especially for web-links to sites regarding the labor law suits and any links to information from the German Labor Court. I would appreciate any help that anyone could provide.
 
In most jurisdictions when a person is laid off some sort of severence settlement is due. Some jurisdictions require very little while some expect quite a bit.
Unfortunately companies, municipalities, and even governments now plot to steal the employees retirement savings, pensions, medical plans, and other promises. What are you supposed to do with the deck stacked like that?
 
The newspaper I once worked for, and where a lot of friends still work, is going through this, and there is no simple answer. You can't make people buy newspapers (or film ) if they don't want to. You can't have a thousand people expect to earn their salaries by printing a thousand newspapers. It's a tragedy, all right, and things DON'T always work out in the end -- some people get completely and utterly screwed, their lives ruined, by the failure of a large company. But usually, the problems can't be helped. One one guy or one group may find a way to profit from the failure, but the ultimate problem is that the company was going to fail no matter what anybody did. Socialism is no cure, as the Soviets proved; you just have a different group of people doing the screwing, and a lot less efficiency, freedom, choice and general welfare along the way.

JC
 
bmattock said:
For those who are unaware of it - in the US, it is easier for companies to 'downsize' and just lay off employees when a company wants to cut back. In Germany and many other places in the EU, it is harder for companies to just lay employees off - there are laws in place that forbid it, or which require that the company doing the layoffs pay large settlements to the workers it lets go. These laws are designed to protect workers, and of course their intentions are good.
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Correct but slightly incomplete. A company can also opt for a different strategy: helping the redundant employees to find other work. The labour unions and the employees' representatives are at rights to know that a company is in dire straights and that redundancies are necessary. Than the "social plan" that (at least in Holland) nearly every company must have in place, takes effect. The social plan is a binding and company-wide agreement between employers and employees on how to deal with redundancies, outsourcing, lay-offs, etc. I don't know how it works in Germany but it seems to me that important information on the financial status of the company was withheld.


I wish corporations behaved with more thought about the needs of their employees and not with 100% focus on the bottom line, but the fact is that in a capitalist system, corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders and not to their employees as such.
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That's where most managers go wrong. The company has a responsibility towards its customers. With customer satisfaction comes returning customers comes sales comes profits comes shareholder value. Customer satisfaction can only be reached by having employees that love to work for the company, take pride in producing the best products they can, and want the customer to be happy. Screw your employees and you'll never get that all-important customer satisfaction, which will then never translate into shareholder value.

Besides, why should ANY manager care for speculators that bring in $10 million at noon and take out $11 million at 2pm? The real and true investors are the employers and, most importantly, the returning, satisfied customers.
 
RML said:
....That's where most managers go wrong. The company has a responsibility towards its customers. With customer satisfaction comes returning customers comes sales comes profits comes shareholder value. Customer satisfaction can only be reached by having employees that love to work for the company, take pride in producing the best products they can, and want the customer to be happy. Screw your employees and you'll never get that all-important customer satisfaction, which will then never translate into shareholder value.

Besides, why should ANY manager care for speculators that bring in $10 million at noon and take out $11 million at 2pm? The real and true investors are the employers and, most importantly, the returning, satisfied customers.
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Without wanting to wade into this any farther than the shallowest depth - I would like to point out the primarly responsibility of managers of a company is to its shareholders (i.e. owners). Meeting that responsibility often times requires strong customer support and employee loyalty - but the first and foremost duty of loyalty of managers is to the owners, not the employees or customers.

With that, I leave this thread to the inevitable.....
 
Concerning AGFA: looks like SOP to me.

It does not concern me that corporations adjust to market forces. That is how the system works at its best. I am concerned about what I perceive as corporations manipulating political factions to facilitate the creation of a corporate command economy.
 
Solinar said:
I generally do not know how I feel about that generalization, but I do like the term, "economic parasitism". I hope it catches on in this climate of manufacturing plant closings and pension defaults.
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Pension defaults are the problem I see most frequently. Plants close and times change but to lose in some cases 30 plus years of pension is more than enough to make you see red. It would ruin my day for sure.

Nikon Bob
 
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