Headquarters effect for Samsung and Motorola

Daniel Lau

SID: 0052899776

Headquarters effect for Samsung and Motorola

When an entrepreneur plans to start up a business, one has to decide where to locate the headquarters in order to coordinate the business in the most efficient way. Location is even more important in global firms because countries vary significantly in various aspects. Within the different factors to consider, economy, political policy and factors of production matters the most. I will choose the mobile industry’s two of the leaders, Motorola and Samsung, as an analysis.

Samsung electronics was founded in 1969 and it’s headquarter is in Seoul, South Korea. The headquarter was originally in South Korea obviously because the founder, Lee Byung-chul was a Korean. Moreover, Samsung electronics was originally manufacturing electronic appliances such as TVs, calculators, refrigerators, air conditioners and washers. Business was mainly local with design and manufacture all in South Korea, it was an obvious plan to place the headquarter there.

As Samsung Electronics merged with Samsung Semiconductor & Communications in 1988, their business started to expand to telecommunication network and semiconductor such as storage device and hard disk drive. Since then they started to become a global industry with headquarter in South Korea and sites world wide.

After the World War II and the Cold War, Korea was divided into South Korea and North Korea with South Korea backing up by the United States and the United Kingdom. Being in a capitalistic system, South Korea encourages free trade and investment, and businesses are owned by individuals instead of the government. Hence, under this capitalist political system, together with the moderate corporate tax rate, a lot of businesses are attracted to establish in South Korea. These steadily build up the prosperous side of South Korea, leading them to be one of the wealthiest countries in Asia.

With the capitalist economy, building headquarters in South Korea has an advantage over other countries in terms of the factors of production and supporting industry. First, the most important asset for a high technology industry is knowledgeable employee and research development. Since South Korea is open to investment, high technology companies are willing to put money into long term training for engineers. Moreover, South Korea has a strong focus on education, where they have the world’s highest estimated national IQ and they also ranked first in mathematics and science. With the pool of talent, establishing headquarters in Seoul guaranteed the future in human resources, which is a smart move for Samsung.

In addition to the education advantage, South Korea’s political economy also attracted other high technology business. In fact, South Korea was one of the leading country in technology. With the presence of related industries, ideas and innovation can flow around easily. For example, with more people interested in developing new mobile technology standards, conference can always be established to facilitate the discussions. Seoul is the Silicon Valley in Korea with a high concentration of technology companies.

With Seoul’s attractive business environment, it also stimulated the urbanization of South Korea. With a fast growing population of more than 2% a year, it has already emerged as a new megacity with 10 million in population. Together with the economic growth, South Korea and Seoul will be a good place for the headquarter of Samsung for years to come.

In the mobile industry, Motorola is another leader. Motorola is headquartered in the United States, Illinois. In terms of country’s policy, United States has been the most capitalistic country over the world.

However, in terms of location, Motorola’s headquarter does not have much benefit over the factors of production. Since United States is a huge land, different locations have their own advantage in a specific industry. For example, the west coast is technology focused with Silicon Valley a lot of research institute in place, while on the east coast it is packed with famous colleges and other non-tech enterprises. When Motorola places it's headquarter in Illinois, although it is convenient for them to recruit top talents in business area from schools such as Harvard, they are isolated from the main high-tech area, which is either in Silicon Valley or Texas, Austin. I think this will be a hard situation for them because in mobile design, designers have to communicate with industry very well to make sure industry standards such as bandwidth and spectrum requirements are met and so on. With headquarters locating thousands of miles away, it is not efficient to carry out the design. Moreover, travelling consumes valuable energy on earth, which makes both the world and the company less sustainable.

Even though location of the headquarter seems to have a big effect towards the operation of the company, I expect in the future 5-10 years, this effect will get smaller. The greatest impact in the future to global business would be government policy. Besides allowing free market economy, even more investments will come if the government give subsides or other stimulating policies. Another important factor would be nation's economy and strength of currencies. Although economic strength encourages companies to setup businesses, but strong currencies mean a higher price for costs of production factors, so there must be a balance between the two.

As far as distance is concerned, technological advancement will bring the already flat world even flatter. Telecommunication network made by both Samsung and Motorola and other enterprise brings the world closer together than ever. A lot of discussions and supervision work can be down using teleconference video technology and gigabits ethernet. Even if hands-on training is necessary, web simulation is able to provide users with training anytime and anywhere. Hence, in the future, the location of headquarter should be less affected by the distance with supporting industry.

Case Study 1: Matsushita’s Culture Changes with Japan

Case Study 1: Matsushita’s Culture Changes with Japan

Japan suffered one of the worst economic hit in history when the economic bubble deflated steeply in the 1990s. Stock prices and real estate slumped enormously mostly due to domestic monetary policies. As a result, companies in Japan faced financial trouble which triggered the cultural change in Japan.

Before the Economic crisis, employee and the company have a particularly close relationship. The company is involved in the live of the employee. For example, a lot of companies require their employee’s manager to sign before they can rent an apartment. On the other hand employees are also very loyal and obliged to their company. With the company’s guaranteed lifetime employment policy, few employees will fancy changing jobs. Moreover they work hard in response to the generous benefit by the company.

However after the economic crisis, companies cannot afford to pay that many benefits to the employees so they finally had to lay them off, which they never did. This cultural change propagates to traditional value change eventually when employees see that loyalty does not guarantee anything. Since then, younger employees started to think more about individual as opposed to group.

Japan is moving towards more individualism than collectivism after the economic bubble. Nonetheless, this is a good opportunity for Japan to adapt to the globalization world and be more competitive. The cultural change will lead to greater mobility of employees, which means people will move around jobs more than before. As a consequence, company loses loyal employees but what they get by recruiting other people is the experiences. When people have mobility, they tend to gain experiences among a lot of companies and build social network among various groups of people. When this happens, new ideas emerge and startups will be built around the new ideas. Hence by moving towards individualism, Japan would create more new business than the past.

Matsushita, a giant Japanese electronics company, was founded in 1918. After the World War II, they mainly supply radios and other appliances to the Japanese. Between the 1950s and 1980s when Japanese culture was still in the traditional way following Confucian’s value, Matsushita has the advantage over other companies due to it’s high technology nature. Since their products are top of the line in terms of technological advancement, research is carried out and training has to be provided. Once they recruited a young employee, Matsushita trained them for specific jobs, and he will carry out the work for years to come. Loyalty and obligation here means better division of labor and lack of professionals’ lost.

After the 1990s, company’s performance was not as good as before. However they still did not abandon the traditional values immediately. I think this is not because of the liability about the traditional values they are bearing, but due to the fact that the employees are all trained professionals. If in any case, the company wants a turnaround, R&D is the most important assets of the company and at least half of the company’s employees are R&D related. Hence, it still kept it’s traditional practice until 1998, and did not have layoffs until 2001.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Matsushita made several human resources announcements. For example, changing management, bonuses scheme and most of all, options in signing contract. With these changes, Matsushita was trying to get the best of both worlds by offering traditional long term contracts and at the same time, provide options to younger employees for a more challenging career. The reason that Matsushita has to move slowly is because there are still a lot of experienced and elder worker in the company, so they had to take care of them. Also, Matsushita is known for it’s traditional values, so if they moved too quickly into the modern ways of managing, the value and image of the company will be lost.

I think that societal cultures can affect business in a very significant way. When societal culture changes, which is happening everywhere, company’s high management has to figure out ways to cope with the change and at the same time, maintaining gains to it’s core business, which is very challenging.

SMIC and ASTRI Collaborate on the Development of the World's First Dual Mode UWB MAC ASIC Supporting Both WiMedia Compliant WLP and China IGRS Networ

SHANGHAI, China, April 21 /Xinhua-PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC -- NYSE: SMI; SEHK: 0981.HK), one of the leading semiconductor foundries in the world, and the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) today jointly announced their partnership to provide the world's first dual mode UWB MAC IC using SMIC's 0.13um mix-mode CMOS technology. SMIC's RF group provides design supports and mixed-signal RFIC open lab services in Shanghai to advance mixed-signal RFIC development on 0.18um, 0.13um, and more advanced technologies. ASTRI and SMIC share the goal of offering wideband IPs to foster the development of advanced wireless RFICs in China.

This UWB MAC ASIC is a WiMedia Compliant UWB MAC IC supporting both Wireless Link Protocol -- (WLP/WiNET), and Information Group Resource Sharing -- (IGRS) standard networking applications. Included in this ASIC design are advanced multi-hop connectivity and Video/Audio Quality of Service (QoS) features. This ASIC targets Wireless Personal Area Networking applications, enabling electronic manufacturers to create innovative, high speed, intelligent, and seamlessly connected wireless multimedia consumer products. This MAC ASIC supports UWB wireless data transmitting and receiving at rates of 53.3Mb/s, 80Mb/s, 106.67Mb/s, 160Mb/s, 200Mb/s, 320Mb/s, 400Mb/s, and 480Mb/s. It also provides a 32-bit direct Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) 2.2 host bus interface. The MAC ASIC is fabricated using SMIC's 0.13um CMOS process and is available in fpBGA-144 Package, with drivers and APIs supporting both Windows and Linux. The ASIC Product Development Kit comes with a Mini-PCI Card Reference Design and Soft IP Core including RTL and Software/Firmware source code.

''As UWB technology advances and related protocols and industry standards mature, the introduction of this UWB MAC ASIC will enable IP-based high speed wireless digital electronics applications for consumer electronics markets,'' said Mr. Peter Diu, Vice President of Wireless Multimedia Technologies Group, ASTRI. ''UWB technology will be deployed in different market segments, including Wireless USB and IP based applications. ASTRI will give its contribution to partners to adopt IP- based WLP/WiNET and IGRS-UWB technologies for personal wireless communications and consumer electronics applications for Home Video/Audio entertainment, Personal Computer, Intelligent IPTV, Wireless Media Server Center, as well as Wireless Mass Storage device products,'' added Mr. Diu.

''The booming wireless communication market drives fabless companies to develop ICs for various applications,'' said Dr. Lee Yang, SMIC senior research fellow. ''The success of the development of the wireless ICs depends a lot on advanced mixed-signal and RF processes and foundry's design support. With the success of ASTRI's WiSMAC IC, we are confident that more wireless IC companies will benefit from SMIC's advanced mixed-signal and RF processes."

Above article from Earth Times
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/smic-and-astri-collaborate-on,358889.shtml

Wireless transmission through AWGN channel with OFDM

OFDM is becoming widely applied in wireless communications systems due to its high rate transmission capability with high bandwidth efficiency and its robustness with regard to multi-path fading and delay [1]. It has been used in digital audio broadcasting (DAB) systems, digital video broadcasting (DVB) systems, digital subscriber line (DSL) standards, and wireless LAN standards such as the American IEEE® Std. 802.11™ (WiFi) and its European equivalent HIPRLAN/2. It has also been proposed for wireless broadband access standards such as IEEE Std. 802.16™ (WiMAX) and as the core technique for the fourth-generation (4G) wireless mobile communications [2].

The basic idea underlying OFDM systems is the division of the available frequency spectrum into several subcarriers. To obtain a high spectral efficiency, the frequency responses of the subcarriers are overlapping and orthogonal, hence the name is OFDM. This orthogonality can be completely maintained with a small price in a loss in SNR, even though the signal passes through a time dispersive fading channel, by introducing a cyclic prefix (CP).

The use of division of the available frequency spectrum in OFDM systems is to avoid need to track a time varying channel; however, it limits the number of bits per symbol and results in a 3 dB loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Coherent modulation allows arbitrary signal constellations, but efficient channel estimation strategies are required for coherent detection and decoding.

Single stage RISC Processor design

RISC Simulatuon Environment

Single stage RISC Processor Diagram

The resulting single cycle RISC processor can handle 12 instruction sets. They are NOP, CPR, AND, NOT, RDM, WRM, ADD, SUB, JMP, JMZ, LPC, LDR. A simple program is tested on this processor successfully with the instructions loaded into the instruction memory.

Google invests in another solar startup

From Mark Lapedus of EETimes

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Solar startup eSolar Inc., a producer of ''scalable'' solar thermal power plants, has closed $130 million in funding from several investors, including search-engine giant Google.

Investors in the startup include Idealab, Google.org, Oak Investment Partners and others. In total, Google and its investment arm, Google.org, have invested $10 million in eSolar.

The funding will be used for the construction and deployment of the company's pre-fabricated power plants. Esolar's distributed solar thermal plants achieve economies of scale at 33 megawatts (MW), according to the company.

Founded in 2007, eSolar claims to have replaced expensive steel, concrete, and brute force with inexpensive computing power and algorithms. This new method of installing a solar power plant minimizes costly civil construction and the use of heavy equipment, reducing project cost and deployment time.

The company has secured land rights in the southwest United States to support the production and transmission of over 1 GW of power. ESolar said that it will have an operational power plant later this year in southern California.

''The eSolar power plant is based on mass manufactured components, and designed for rapid construction, uniform modularity, and unlimited scalability,'' said Asif Ansari, CEO of eSolar (Pasadena, Calif.), in a statement.

One of its investors, Google, has taken a strong interest in solar and other technologies. In 2004, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin vowed to contribute significant resources, including 1 percent of Google's equity and profits in some form, as well as employee time, to address some of the world's most urgent problems. That commitment became a new entity, dubbed Google.org.

As of January 2008, Google.org and the Google Foundation have committed more than $75 million in grants and investments.

It has made several investments in renewable energy. For example, Google's founders have invested in solar startup Nanosolar Inc. Google.org has also made a $10 million investment in Makani Power Inc., which would support R&D on high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed at producing utility-scale power cheaper than coal.

According to Google.org's Web site, the group has also made investments in the following entities:

*Brookings Institution: $200,000 to support a conference in spring 2008 on federal policy to promote plug-in hybrids.

*CalCars: $200,000 multi-year grant to the California Cars Initiative to support their work educating the public about plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

*Electric Power Research Institute: $200,000 to support EPRI's plug-in vehicle research and development program including participating in advanced infrastructure development, vehicle-to-grid technology demonstrations, and studies of the environmental and economic benefits of plug-ins.

*Plug-In America: $100,000 to raise public awareness of and to advocate for plug-in transportation options.

*Rocky Mountain Institute: $200,000 to partially fund an 'Innovation Workshop' to promote new strategies for greater production and market adoption of plug-in next-generation hybrid vehicles.

*Dr. Willett Kempton at University of Delaware: $150,000 for megawatt plug-in to grid research and implementation planning.

=================================================================

Nice move to be a sustainable business!!

But... 1% of equity on the MOST urgent issue on earth??? Well.....