Word: germanization
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With its trademark three-pronged star and celebrated German engineering, Mercedes-Benz has been the brand of choice for generations of celebrities, both actual and aspiring, from the late Pope John Paul II to Scarlett Johansson. It's a brand mystique most competitors can only dream about, and it has turned Mercedes, part of the DaimlerChrysler conglomerate, into an industry colossus with annual sales of more than 1 million cars and revenues exceeding $60 billion...
...takes over the whole works. He is quick to caution against comparisons between Mercedes in 2005 and Chrysler in '02, but it didn't take long for Zetsche to strike. Mercedes just announced 8,500 job cuts in Germany. That's about 9% of the work force--by German standards a huge layoff. The company's hands were tied by a previous deal with unions that guaranteed jobs until 2011, but Zetsche is circumventing that through voluntary buyouts. They will cost the firm more than $1 billion, or a whopping $135,000 a person. Zetsche doesn't mince words about...
...will have to wrestle with the big issues that are plaguing the whole of German industry, not just its automakers: unit labor costs that are among the highest in the world, productivity that's been overtaken by many rivals and worries about losing its technological edge. In a blunt letter to Mercedes employees announcing the layoffs, Zetsche wrote that "our costs in all parts of the value chain are significantly higher than those of the best competitors" and that the company was dragging around too much production capacity. Becker, the former BMW economist, contends in a book published last month...
...Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart, the question of what went wrong has been pored over in great detail. Senior managers are eager to move on, to talk about the future rather than to air their dirty linen in public. After several rounds of mutual recriminations in the German press over responsibility for the faulty electronics, management has struck an agreement with key suppliers such as Bosch not to blame each other. In their self-critical moments, executives say they ramped up production of the E-Class too quickly. before it was ready, and that they were overstretched by the introduction...
Even Mercedes' German rivals, while eager to exploit the sales opportunity, are rooting for a modest recovery. "In the end it's also a German brand," says Ralph Weyler, the board member responsible for sales and marketing at Audi. "Generally, it prompts the discussion, Are the Japanese better than the Germans? We're all thrown into the same...