Coquettish Rebirth

It was mid-May 2001, and Cisco announced their full financial report for the first quarter, and the financial report was ugly and messy!

How difficult is this financial report to see?Jia Hongjian's attention was not even attracted by Cisco's sales figures in the first quarter, and then in the same period last year. Instead, he was attracted by another set of appalling figures—in the fourth quarter of 2000, In the quarter, Cisco successfully surpassed Microsoft and became the leader of the company with the highest market value in the United States and even the world's highest market value!Originally, at the beginning of 2000, Microsoft's market value exceeded 6000 billion U.S. dollars, and then with the arrival of the stock market crash, Microsoft's market value dropped to 5416 billion U.S. dollars, which is not a big drop.Then, after the financial report for the fourth quarter came out, Cisco's performance in 2000 was good, and there was not much decline, which aroused the enthusiasm of the market.So for a while, Cisco's stock was sought after against the trend, and its market value soared to 5554 billion U.S. dollars!

Then, starting from March 2001, 3, the market began to say that Cisco was very sad this year, and its financial report would be quite ugly.Not only that, the market value began to decline all the way, and the news of various partners' default, bankruptcy and cancellation of cooperation came one after another, and many former cooperative manufacturers expressed that they would shrink and not expand this year.Such a reaction from the surrounding area alone will cause Cisco's stock price to fall all the way!Now there are only 28 billion US dollars left! In 4000 months, it dropped 2 billion US dollars!Is this an exaggeration?Then after the financial report came out, the stock price plummeted all the way again!Let alone 2000 billion. 4000 billion is not necessarily the end!Maybe it will fall to 3000 billion!What is this rush?That is to say, the price of a single stock has fallen by at least half!

Then Cisco's CEO Chambers accepted various media interviews. He said that although he has not yet made up his mind to start global layoffs, he personally hopes that 3% of the company's employees and management personnel around the world can be transferred to work, so that To reduce salaries, it is best for 1% of employees to resign voluntarily to help the company reduce costs and tide over difficulties.That doesn't sound like much?But you must know that Cisco has more than 5 employees around the world!And this is only the first quarter earnings report!If the financial report for the second quarter is still like this, the next step will definitely be large-scale layoffs!Maybe more than 5000 employees will be fired directly to save money!

Let’s look at the financial report next—I don’t know if it’s because of last year’s misjudgment that Cisco felt that the global network market just suffered from a small cold and will recover soon, so their production volume has not decreased.The result of this is that although this year's turnover has not dropped much.But the over-produced inventory can't be sold at all-after all, they expected to increase sales this year compared to last year!Their first quarter sales were $43 billion.It is 57% lower than the US$25 billion in the same period last year. This seems to be good, but the profit is quite ugly. Their overall net profit in the first quarter was only US$700 million! 700 million!Compared with the profit in the same period last year, it has dropped by 99%!Profit for the same period last year was $7.96 million!What is this concept?So the next Cisco's stock price is absolutely finished.It must be suspected that the Milky Way falls like nine days, and it will not stop!

In this sudden acknowledgment of a market crash.Many investment institutions in the United States were dumbfounded.The common people in the United States are dumbfounded!Everyone can't figure out what's going on!In other words, it feels like the stock price of Microsoft, which was still very good yesterday, fell a little under the rumors, and then why is it suddenly about to jump?Why is it that the profit for the whole quarter is only 1% of the same period last year?Such a big company is about to collapse in an instant?Cisco is like this.So what about Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and so on?There is even ibm, will these companies jump one by one?

Cisco announced that in the next time, they will not work hard to make sales performance.That's right!Under this crisis, Cisco announced directly and aboveboard that they would not care about performance for the next half a year!All they have to do is to do everything possible to keep cash flow!In order to maintain cash flow, they even stopped cooperating with upstream component manufacturers. If they don’t purchase goods, they sell their inventory, so that the company can have more cash. Don’t fucking go into shock and die!

What about Microsoft?Microsoft is actually doing just fine.Although various analysts in the market have analyzed that Microsoft's antitrust case may soon have a result, the worst result may be that Microsoft is directly divided into two, and then it will suddenly become a shared brand between two medium-sized giants. The additional sales volume has also dropped a bit, and a rumor has even popped up in the past two days-in order to provoke Microsoft, some hackers directly hacked into Microsoft's server, and then stole some things!Has the website of an operating system manufacturer been hacked?And don't even know what's missing?All of this also threatens Microsoft's stock price!Under such a low market situation, even if Microsoft's sales did not actually drop much compared to the previous one, it was only a relatively large drop compared to the same period in 2000, but this also caused Microsoft's stock to turn around and fall.It's just that because a game console such as xbox is about to be released, the market still has a little confidence in Microsoft's profitability, so the drop is not as scary as Cisco!

Almost at the same time, the financial reports of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Compaq were also announced.Coincidentally, the performance of these two computer companies has been declining all the way.However, this kind of decline does not mean that there has been a collapsed decline, but that it has fallen all the way as before——Hewlett-Packard changed its boss at the end of 99, and the old smoker Louis Jia Hongjian knew before, Then a fat old man who never signed a contract when doing business, but only relied on loyalty and trust in good words retired, and a new woman came up.

This woman's name is Feriona. If her name is typed in pinyin without soundproof characters, it will easily become "Fertilizer", and such a Chinese "nickname" has become a common name for her in the United States. Evaluation - I can't be a CEO at all, it's better to break her up and use it to fertilize the flowers and plants.That might be a very mean thing to say.Especially for the only female CEO among the 30 Dow Jones standard stocks, it is very sexist or machismo.But the fact is that when the old smoking gun was in power, HP's business was going up all the way.As a result, after this woman took over, even if it was the "golden time" in the first quarter of 2000, the performance of HP as a whole went down!Does this make people not doubt her ability?But she just continued to work in this position, and then HP's performance became worse and worse all the way!

This woman who looks a little bit like Clinton's wife, the old hag Hillary, was not a member of HP before. Unlike the old smoking gun, she did not rise from within HP at all.Instead, it was airborne.She previously worked at AT&T for 20 years.Then when AT&T split Lucent, she went to Lucent to become an executive.Then out of nowhere, after the old smoker decided to retire, she was hired by the board of directors to be the boss!

It's okay if she comes over to be the boss, but when the old smoker is in place.The "people first" attitude that HP has practiced for decades has changed directly.indeed.When the old smoking gun is around.Because he grew up within the HP system, he took great care of the HP people, and even made the company a bit like the "big pot" and "didling" in Chinese state-owned enterprises.After this woman came.That's really according to the classic tutorial of Western management. As soon as they came, they announced that they would break the iron rice bowl, start paying salaries according to performance, and also implement tail-end elimination!We need to drive away all the dawdling people, abolish the previous practice of not paying attention to competition between departments, and start to pay attention to competition within the same department. It's like driving everyone into the jungle. Survive desperately!

Then, after this woman becomes the boss, what should she pay attention to?Pay attention to orders and prohibitions!Pay attention to that she is the boss, she is the leader, only she has the right to describe the future path forward, others must follow her path unconditionally, and then strive to realize her description!This is in stark contrast to the incompetence of the old smoker before, who then pulled the heads of various departments to sit together, and everyone started brainstorming and thinking about how to do it in the future!The results of it?After this woman came to power for more than a year, HP, a company as proficient in various in-depth scientific research as IBM, had many scientific research projects cut off.Then it became a pure manufacturing company, but the level of manufacturing was getting worse and worse. In terms of computer manufacturing, it was caught up by "kids" like Dell, not to mention that the market share was given by others. Overwhelmed!

At the same time lost to Canon, Nikon and Sony on digital cameras, and lost to Epson and Canon on printers!It can be said that it completely degrades the entire field of HP!Then this woman may have to show excessive toughness in order to be among a group of men and to overwhelm these men, as if she had to be more ruthless than men in order to overwhelm men.She often appeared in front of the media, and fiercely stated in the flash that she would make HP more wolf-like and more in line with the survival criteria of the jungle era.Although there is a decline, it is only the initial discomfort. She will transform the enterprise into a new enterprise that is completely integrated from top to bottom and conforms to modern management!

However, for more than a year, when she kept appearing fiercely in front of the flashing lights, Hewlett-Packard, a comprehensive scientific research giant that used to be like ibm, ge and other "technology" companies, has gradually become a "manufacturing company." "The company began to compete with various companies such as Canon and Dell, but the funny thing is that it can't compete with them in terms of market share or profit.From a certain point of view, Jia Hongjian felt that this woman was doing everything in the opposite direction of Collins' "fifth-level CEO"!Not only airborne, but also all kinds of viciousness, all kinds of scriptures-even Chinese students should pay attention to changing dogmatism to suit China's local conditions, and also change the Soviet Union's method of rebellion in central cities. Surround the city with the countryside!When this woman came to HP, she followed the textbooks in the school and did not combine it with HP's actual situation at all. Can this thing work?

Then, according to Jia Hongjian's understanding, this woman would also advocate the acquisition of Compaq.In the past, Compaq’s acquisition of dec was still understandable, because Compaq was mainly engaged in personal computers, while dec was mainly engaged in business users and servers, so such an acquisition and merger would allow Compaq to quickly acquire industry users resources and technology.But the problem is that HP also does these things. HP makes many more things than Compaq, but the products are too similar in terms of computers, and theoretically there is no need to acquire them.However, Jia Hongjian knew that within this year, HP would acquire Compaq. As a result, after the acquisition, the company has been in civil turmoil, and the relationship has been unclear.From a certain point of view, this woman Hu Lai is really going to downgrade a once brilliant company like HP step by step.Maybe Collins can look back at what this woman did, and then publish a book "How CEOs Destroyed Giant Companies", to investigate a little bit of history, and select how those fools who followed the scriptures brought down outstanding companies little by little. Become excellent, then turn an excellent company into an ordinary one, and finally destroy an ordinary company... (to be continued...)