HundK hundreds of millions in debt

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Vonz90
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by Vonz90 »

HTRN wrote:
Netpackrat wrote:
HTRN wrote:The other thing to remember is theyre are different goals for german large corps, than US ones, notably, that they seem to largly exist to provide comfortable well paying jobs to germans - making a profit is secondary. It comes from having the german government having their fingers in every german megacorp.
It sounds like you are saying the reports of National Socialism's death have been greatly exaggerated.
It seems that way, doesnt it?

They also have the nasty habit of buying foreign corps, like Chrysler, squeezing every penny out of it, then dumping the corpse. In order to support jobs at home. They did it to Chrysler, Airbourne Express, and many more.

Short answer: if your employer is bought by germans, update your resume.
That is funny relative to Chrysler - They were next to bankruptcy when Daimler bought them, they dumped a ton of money into them and the more or less gave them away when they realized they were just throwing good money after bad.
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HTRN
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by HTRN »

Vonz90 wrote:That is funny relative to Chrysler - They were next to bankruptcy when Daimler bought them, they dumped a ton of money into them and the more or less gave them away when they realized they were just throwing good money after bad.
They were near bankruptcy at the end, at the time of the merger they were making a billion a quarter, and had 12 billion in cash.
HTRN, I would tell you that you are an evil fucker, but you probably get that a lot ~ Netpackrat

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Vonz90
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by Vonz90 »

HTRN wrote:
Vonz90 wrote:That is funny relative to Chrysler - They were next to bankruptcy when Daimler bought them, they dumped a ton of money into them and the more or less gave them away when they realized they were just throwing good money after bad.
They were near bankruptcy at the end, at the time of the merger they were making a billion a quarter, and had 12 billion in cash.
They were making some money at the time, Chrysler has been bouncing between boom and bust since the 80's and always look great right up until they are going bust because they are not big enough to get the economies of scale they need to play in the markets they play in. So they were way short of what they needed and they were also trying to fight off a corporate raider takeover (from Kirk Kerkorian).

They went to Daimler and asked them to be a white knight. Daimler should have walked away, instead they bought them for $36B only to pay $650M to Cerberus to get them to take them off of their hands a few years later. The main blame to push towards Daimler is that they did not do their due diligence and I also don't think they thought through how exactly they would combine a value car maker with a luxury brand without tainting the luxury brand (news flash, they couldn't).

In the end, Daimler is really a truck and heavy equipment company that plays in the luxury car market a bit (just in the US, they own Detroit Diesel, Freightliner, Western Star, Thomas Built Buses - for years). They did not know a freaking thing about that side of the market and worse they did know what they did not know.

If they wanted to screw over Chrysler to help themselves, they did a very poor job of it. What they did was screw over their shareholder for no gain to anyone.
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HTRN
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

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They did the same thing to freightliner a few years earlier, and have only recently recovered.

Most of the blame can be laid at Eatons feet, the man who iacocca said his appointment as ceo was the biggest mistake of his career.
HTRN, I would tell you that you are an evil fucker, but you probably get that a lot ~ Netpackrat

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Vonz90
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

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HTRN wrote:They did the same thing to freightliner a few years earlier, and have only recently recovered.

Most of the blame can be laid at Eatons feet, the man who iacocca said his appointment as ceo was the biggest mistake of his career.
They still own Freightliner and have continuously since 1981, so I am not sure where you are going with this.

https://daimler-trucksnorthamerica.com/ ... er-trucks/
Rich Jordan
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by Rich Jordan »

I can't find it right now but there was a set of magazine editorials about what MB did to Chrysler, especially after 'Dr. Z' left.

They not only covered the billions in cash reserves and how they were used up by corporate, but also went through pre and post car lines, showing changes in design and comparing material quality, etc. It was pretty much downgrades across the board, pushing Daimler's older chassis and drivetrains 'down' to the American division, etc. They made a point that Daimler boned Chrysler in a lot of ways, mostly beancounter related.

We and our family had Chrysler cars that were pre and several year post Daimler. The interior quality of the relatively higher line car and truck post Daimler was absolutely lower, more cheap plastic-y, more 'uniform for easier molding' and less stylized than the pre Daimler cars.

Daimler made its own decisions concerning the cheapening of the Mercedes brand, somewhat concurrently. I saw Top Gear say they (Mercedes Benz) thought there cars were so over-engineered that they could get away with winding things back to (more than good enough, but not as good as before) and getting thwacked by their customers.

We were shareholders in Chrysler (not a big stake) so we got all the annual reports and some additional documentation during the DC days, and the sheer volume of hatred of America and American things, and 'evil Chrysler makes tanks (years after the defense division was sold off) from German shareholders was something to see.
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Vonz90
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

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I was doing tier 1 engineering for Chrysler both pre and post merger. Chrysler was a screwed up mess in both cases. How they made anything that even turned on much less ran for a bit was surprising. I did not notice it getting any worse or better pre/post. They were (and are) systematically fucked up - particularly in terms of engineering decisions being made by bean counters who have absolutely no idea of the actual consequences of the decisions they were making. It was mind boggling bad.

For comparison; Ford is kind of screwed up in that way, but to much less of a degree.
I have not worked enough with GM to say about them on the design side. Production wise, they are always chasing nickels. Actually, that is a problem with all of the US companies, it is hard to maintain quality when you are constantly trying to take money out of the product (and thus always churning the design/production).

Of the Japanese, Honda and Toyota are a pain in the butt to deal with sometimes, but at least their priorities are more or less in line with reality and best of all, once they have something that works well they leave it alone. Nissan is a bunch of dishonest, backstabbing SOB's who somehow produce mediocre cars in their spare time. Mitsubishi is all chaos all the time.

Of the Germans, I only ever worked with BMW much. They are very much a pain the butt to work with, but they don't quibble about a price much if you can show them it will give them a better result, so I will not fault them on that.
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Jered
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

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Vonz90 wrote:
Of the Japanese, Honda and Toyota are a pain in the butt to deal with sometimes, but at least their priorities are more or less in line with reality and best of all, once they have something that works well they leave it alone. Nissan is a bunch of dishonest, backstabbing SOB's who somehow produce mediocre cars in their spare time. Mitsubishi is all chaos all the time.
What about Subaru/Fuji Heavy Industries?
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
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Vonz90
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by Vonz90 »

Jered wrote:
Vonz90 wrote:
Of the Japanese, Honda and Toyota are a pain in the butt to deal with sometimes, but at least their priorities are more or less in line with reality and best of all, once they have something that works well they leave it alone. Nissan is a bunch of dishonest, backstabbing SOB's who somehow produce mediocre cars in their spare time. Mitsubishi is all chaos all the time.
What about Subaru/Fuji Heavy Industries?
I have not worked with them, so I do not know.
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Jered
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Re: HundK hundreds of millions in debt

Post by Jered »

Damn, I was hoping for some good info.
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
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