Looking back on January, what we feel most is that the layoffs of large companies in Europe and the United States have caused many people to collapse. At the same time, many executives at the CEO, president and other levels of multinational enterprises also announced that they would be replaced. The pressure of performance and the grasp of future development direction forced the company to make greater changes. The transfer of enterprise supply chain has also been a hot topic for several years.

In terms of new technologies and applications, chat robot ChatGPT has become the hottest topic in the near future. Next, let's come together.

Layoffs

The US technology layoffs in 2022 led to more than 100000 people losing their jobs. In the first month of 2023, the layoff tide has expanded to Europe and more industries. According to incomplete statistics, the number of layoffs announced in January exceeded 74000.

Amazon. com plans to lay off more than 18000 employees. This figure is higher than the company's initial plan, and will also be the largest layoff disclosed by a large technology company so far. Most of the layoffs will involve Amazon stores and personnel, experience and technology departments.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced that it would eliminate 12000 jobs, accounting for more than 6% of its global workforce. The impact of this layoff has spread all over the world, involving Alphabet from top to bottom.

Microsoft announced that it would lay off 10000 people, hoping to cut costs in the face of economic uncertainty, and refocus on strategic priorities such as artificial intelligence (AI). The number of layoffs this time is less than 5% of its global workforce.

Salesforce said that the company was in the process of restructuring, including layoffs of about 10%. In addition, the company will also rent out in some markets to reduce office space. By the end of January 2022, the number of employees of SAFTSE reached 73541.

IBM, the US technology giant, announced that it would cut about 1.5% of its global employees. This time, the number of layoffs will reach about 3900. The focus of the layoffs will be on the employees left after the division of Kyndryl and Watson Health.

SAP, the German software giant, is launching a restructuring plan that will involve the reduction of about 2800 employees.

Lam Research, one of the three major suppliers of chip manufacturing equipment in the United States, will lay off about 1300 people worldwide, about 7% of its employees, in order to reduce expenses in the declining market.

Spotify, a streaming music service company, plans to cut its staff by 6%. The music streaming media giant has about 9800 employees.

Philips, the Dutch medical equipment giant, plans to further lay off 6000 people worldwide by 2025 to restore profitability. The layoffs account for about 8% of the total number of employees, of which 3000 will be laid off this year. The layoffs were carried out on the basis of the 4000 layoffs announced last October.

Goldman Sachs officially launched one of the largest layoffs in its history. The top investment bank on Wall Street has finalized a plan to cut about 3200 jobs, which also indicates that the layoffs of Goldman Sachs in this round will be greater than that of its major Wall Street competitors. More than one third of them come from its core trading and banking sectors.

Ford Motor plans to lay off about 3200 people in Europe, including up to 2500 product development positions and up to 700 administrative positions, with Germany being the most affected.

Goodyear Tire&Rubber said that due to the challenging industrial environment and the cost pressure caused by inflation, the company plans to eliminate about 500 jobs.

3M, a giant manufacturer of consumer goods and industrial goods, announced that it planned to lay off about 2500 manufacturing jobs due to the difficult operating environment in overseas markets and weak consumer demand.

Change of command

With the arrival of the new year, some leading enterprises in the global industry began to change their ranks, and Toyota Motor Company was the most attractive one.

Toyota Motor announced that its executive director, Hiroshi Sato, will take over as president on April 1. The current president, Akio Toyoda, will become the new chairman, and Takeshi Uyama will resign as chairman. Akio Toyoda is the grandson of the founder of Toyota. He became the president of Toyota Motor Company in 2009. Facing the realization of decarbonization society, the company strives to expand the sales of pure electric vehicles and other products. It may be that at the time when the product strength has been improved and the profitability has been strengthened, it is decided to implement the replacement of management leaders.

Frank Yeary was appointed as the new independent chairman of semiconductor giant Intel , and Omar Ishrak decided to step down as chairman.

Ericsson said that Jan Carlson was nominated as the new chairman to replace Ronnie Leten, who decided not to run for re-election at the next shareholders' meeting.

Nan Cunhui will resign as president of Chint Electric Co., Ltd. and continue to serve as chairman of the company and special committee of the board of directors.

Wang Fengying, former general manager of Great Wall Motors, officially joined Xiaopeng Motors as president, and will be fully responsible for the product planning, product matrix and sales system of Xiaopeng Motors.

Foxconn announced that Guan Run, the former president of Nidec, will serve as the Group's chief electric vehicle strategy officer, which is the first time that the Group has hired a high-profile executive for this business.

Invest in China and go to sea with Chinese capital

Multinational enterprises have made some new investments in China.

Panasonic Holdings of Japan regards China as a market that is expected to grow in the long term and launches an offensive to accelerate the pace of investment. In the three years to 2024, more than 50 billion yen will be invested to build or expand more than 10 home appliance and air-conditioning equipment factories. Panasonic's investment is considered to be the largest investment in China's home appliance and home equipment business since 2000. The first new home appliance factory in China in 18 years will be put into operation in Zhejiang in 2024.

Chinese enterprises also have new trends in overseas investment.

BYD is making efforts to layout the Indian market. BYD India executives said that this year's goal is to sell 15000 cars in India, which will make it the second largest electric vehicle company in India after Tata Motors.

Alibaba began to allow European shoppers on its cross-border e-commerce platform to pay after receiving goods, in an attempt to promote global sales.

JD has made major adjustments in its international business and will close its stations in Thailand and Indonesia. While shrinking the local e-commerce business in Southeast Asia, JD.com has also continued to increase its logistics and warehousing layout in Southeast Asia, Europe and North America in recent years, among which 20 intelligent logistics parks have been operated in Indonesia alone.

Supply chain

The layout of the global supply chain has been changing in recent years due to the COVID-19 epidemic and regional relations.

Apple, the world's largest consumer electronics company, has significantly adjusted its strategy of concentrating assembly processes in one country in China, and has begun to promote decentralization with an alarming momentum. In Vietnam, including trial production products, many OEM factories have begun to produce earphones, watch-type terminals and laptops. In India, Foxconn, which undertakes about 80% of the smartphone iPhone OEM business, has set up a factory in the southern suburb of Chennai, increasing the production of the latest iPhone 14. Apple's 14 Chinese suppliers have obtained the initial permission of the Indian government to carry out business locally. These include subsidiaries of Lucent Precision and Sunny Optical Technology.

Sony Group has transferred the production of cameras sold in Japan, America and Europe from China to Thailand. In principle, Chinese factories only produce products for China. The production of cameras for the United States took the lead, and the transfer of cameras for Japan and Europe also ended before the end of 2022. Previously, it exported from two bases in China and Thailand to the world. In the future, Chinese factories will only produce products for the Chinese market, and retain some equipment that can be supplied outside China in emergencies such as disasters. According to the data, Sony's camera sales in 2022 reached about 2.11 million in the world. Among them, 150000 products are for China, and more than 90% are for products outside China, such as Japan, the United States and Europe.

Yaskawa of Japan will build a new factory in Fukuoka, where its headquarters is located, to increase the proportion of Japanese domestic procurement of inverter and other components. The finishing process of the main product inverter (packaging electronic components on the printed substrate) will be changed to a new factory in Japan. The self-production rate of main parts will increase from 25% to 50%. Previously, most of the OEM enterprises were entrusted to complete the finishing process in China and other Asian regions, but the OEM enterprises were also unable to purchase all the parts under the epidemic, which made it difficult to determine the delivery date. Among the Japanese enterprises that purchase products from overseas or use imported goods, 24.6% have implemented or are discussing the countermeasures of changing the purchase point to domestic or using domestic goods. In the context of supply chain chaos caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, stable procurement has become very important. In addition, the depreciation of the yen caused the increase of import costs, which also boosted the return to China.

Industry trends and trends

New energy vehicles have become one of the largest investment fields in the world.

The electric vehicles of local brands such as BYD, Xiaopeng, Ideal Automobile and Weilai are increasingly popular with Chinese consumers, which poses a threat to foreign brands that rely on the world's largest auto market. It is expected that China's booming electric vehicle industry will further consolidate its global leading position this year, leaving behind the electric vehicle industry in the United States and Europe, which are striving to catch up. According to the prediction of the company and analysts, Chinese consumers will purchase about 8 million to 10 million electric vehicles in 2023, higher than the record 6.5 million in 2022 and 3.5 million in 2021. By comparison, the number in Europe is nearly 3 million and that in the United States is 2 million.

Mercedes-Benz plans to establish its own global electric vehicle charging network and become one of the few large automobile companies that directly invest in such projects except Tesla.

Toyota Motor is considering launching a new manufacturing platform specially designed for electric vehicles as part of its efforts to find a profitable transformation for mass production of electric vehicles.

Tesla will spend more than $3.6 billion to expand its factory near Reno, Nevada, where it will produce batteries and electric vehicle parts.

ZF Friedrichshafen, a German auto supplier, and Wolfspeed of the United States plan to invest US $3 billion in Saarland, Germany, to build a wafer factory to produce chips for electric vehicles and other applications.

BASF, a German chemical giant, and Eramet, a French nickel giant, plan to invest up to US $2.6 billion to build a nickel and cobalt refinery in Indonesia to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles. Investment in the global semiconductor sector is facing differentiation.

On the one hand, the United States has realized in the past two years that semiconductors are now as important to the modern economy as oil. Now, the United States government and companies are spending a lot of money to build domestic manufacturing industry and guarantee chip supply. The United States has been deeply affected by the supply chain tension that caused the chip shortage. The automaker lost $210 billion in sales last year due to the chip shortage.

On the other hand, the global market of semiconductor manufacturing equipment may step on the brakes in 2023. Concerns about the slowdown in economic growth are expected to reduce the demand for semiconductors. International semiconductor industry organizations predict that the market will shrink for the first time in four years. The semiconductor industry includes manufacturers in three fields: semiconductor, manufacturing equipment, materials and components. According to the industry organization SEMI, the global sales of manufacturing equipment in 2023 is expected to decrease by about 16% over the previous year. SEMI believes that the market downturn is short-term and will recover in 2024.

The demand for scientific and technological products will remain sluggish.

The head of consumer products of Samsung Electronics expects that the demand for scientific and technological products will continue to be sluggish this year due to high inflation, rising interest rates and the pressure of the strong dollar on sales. Han Zongxi, vice chairman and co-chief executive of Samsung Electronics, said that he hoped that the current downturn in the industry would begin to improve in the second half of this year. This downturn has led to the interruption of the momentum of Samsung Electronics to achieve new profits. Samsung Electronics plans to overcome the current market challenges by strengthening the integration of networking devices and related software. In this regard, Samsung has lagged behind Apple and other competitors.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT should be one of the hottest topics in the near future.

OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, an AI chat robot that has been burning recently, was founded in 2015 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. OpenAI launched the AI chat robot ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. Only two months later, its monthly active users are estimated to have reached 100 million, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history.

In January this year, about 13 million independent visitors around the world used ChatGPT every day. Chat robots can imitate human conversations and give intelligent responses to simple written requests of users. It can also use the company's Dall-E model to synthesize art and images at the prompt.

OpenAI is negotiating to sell its existing shares in the form of a takeover offer. The transaction valued the company at about $29 billion, making it one of the most valuable American startups on the book without much revenue. Microsoft announced that it has expanded its partnership with OpenAI. As the third phase of the partnership between the two companies, Microsoft will make a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI to accelerate its technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). The specific scale of Microsoft's investment is said to be as high as US $10 billion. Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and is currently trying to implement this AI software in its Bing search engine and Microsoft design applications.

BuzzFeed, an American digital media company, said that the company would rely on OpenAI, the founder of ChatGPT, to strengthen part of its content creation, and planned to let AI play a greater role in the company's editing and business operations this year. The company will use OpenAI's open application programming interface (API), and the new AI test will produce personalized results for individual users.

Internet giants are also following similar products.

Google is testing new AI driven chat products, which may affect the release of future public products, including a new chat robot and a potential way to integrate it into search engines. Google is carrying out a project called "Atlas" under its cloud computing department, which is a response to ChatGPT, a large language chat robot. Google is also testing a chat robot called "Apprentice Bard". Employees can ask questions and get detailed answers similar to ChatGPT.

Baidu is developing a chat robot driven by AI, similar to ChatGPT, which is popular with OpenAI, and plans to integrate it into Baidu's main search engine in March. The search giant also plans to establish an independent website for users to use the tool.

Will ChatGPT lead a new breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence? Let's wait and see.

Note: The text is reproduced to the global enterprise news, and the article is only for sharing.