back to article GlobalFoundries CEO: Europe must 'wake up' and help industry

The CEO of chip-baker GlobalFoundries, Ajit Manocha, believes that European Union bureaucrats – "Brussels," as he refers to them – need to "wake up" or the continent's industrial base will suffer. "One of the fundamental flaws in [European] thinking [is that] they are focused on innovation. There's no focus on manufacturing in …

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  1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Could be worse

    Imagine how bad it would have been if the European Commission had continued to focused their attention on manufacturing.

    Last time, we had the DRAM tax - a tax on DRAM not manufactured in the EU. Everyone in Europe suffered from high DRAM prices. The foundaries still closed. The was a lucrative market in 'second hand simms' - anything that looked like a memory module was marked as defective and shipped to the far east so it could be 'replaced' under guaranty without incurring import tax.

    Whatever the government does, sane people hope they do it to someone else.

  2. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Pirate

    Meanwhile, in another part of the universe, on an altogether higher plane of understanding

    And about those bureaucrats in Brussels, "I'm waiting for them to wake up and call – otherwise I'll probably call them." .... GlobalFoundries CEO, Ajit Manocha

    Call a smart turned on and virtually tuned in bank instead , AM, and save yourself wasting time. You'll find that heads there will be more than just happy to do all that weary political legwork and boring corporate nonsense for you whilst you make them real money with shared intellectual property churning out surreal wealth to be capitalised and capitalised upon ie exploited religiously. :-)

    You know it makes Perfect Sense in All of those Sectors and Vectors which are IT Controlled and Cyber Powered.

  3. An0n C0w4rd

    More complaining about taxes

    "not focusing on manufacturing" = "not paying us to put/keep our plant in your country/region"

    Except even if they do get incentive packages, what guarantee is there they won't play the double -Irish sandwich (or whatever its called) and shift 90% of their tax liability out of the country, or pay "franchise" or "Intellectual Property" fees to some tax haven and get out of paying whatever tax we DON'T waive for them?

    Jobs and manufacturing is one thing, but if we still don't see any revenue (except for the workers), do we really benefit for all the incentives we give?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More complaining about taxes

      Yeah, who needs jobs! Life would be so much better if we all worked on Soviet style collective farms with no technology at all!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Europe doesn't want manufacturing because it requires vast amounts of power, power needs generation, generation invariably means carbon as nobody can be bothered to use nuclear/geothermal. Carbon means missed targets and no feel good factor in telling the nations that do all our manufacturing to do better.

    Also generally, manufacturing is very low yield unless you're making luxury goods (and that is only high yield if you own the chain from IP to manufacture to final sale)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    yeah screw manufacturing

    Yes, screw manufacturing and boring factory work, we'll just do all the r&d.

    Only , what about the people only qualified to do manufacturing?

    What they going to do? rot on the dole living off your taxes. And you are going to be ok with that?

    What the guys saying is there's got to be work for everyone, or the excluded bit will get upset and lynch you one day.

  6. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    FAIL

    Hey brother, can you spare me a subsidy?

    This is Global Foundries that was spun out of AMD because it was losing money, that closed factories in German once the subsidies ran out and is now largely owned by a sovereign wealth fund.

    Chips are high volume, low margin products. Not the sort of thing that Europe excels at. We're better at designing the chips or making the machines to make and test them - frickin' lasers. Of course, we could go the way of the Japanese and continue to funnel billions and billions into factories with a lifetime of five years that never turn a profit.

  7. h3

    Funneling money into manufacturing (And having world class utilities / post / telecoms by nationalisation if necessary) is a better idea than funnelling it into banks.

    Having the capability to actual produce something is a useful thing to have. (Far better than convincing people to buy stuff.)

    The reason the US is so strong is if it was in their best interests they could stop any imports / exports and be self sufficient.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      @h3

      And having world class utilities / post / telecoms by nationalisation if necessary)

      World class by nationalisation? Now there's two concepts that you don't hear together very often. For a reason.

      As for the "US so strong...be self sufficient"? What are you on? The US has a vast trade deficit, the biggest of any nation in all of recorded history. Like Europe, far too much of the US' industrial base has migrated to China and other cheap locations, and the US is self sufficient in only two things: Armaments and bull****. Just to offer a factette in support of this point, the annual US trade deficit has been consistently around $600 billion for the past decade.

  8. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Confused and Bewildered. Not a Fine State of Affairs for States into Events, Dear Boy, Events*

    Funneling money into manufacturing (And having world class utilities / post / telecoms by nationalisation if necessary) is a better idea than funnelling it into banks.

    Having the capability to actual produce something is a useful thing to have. (Far better than convincing people to buy stuff.)

    The reason the US is so strong is if it was in their best interests they could stop any imports / exports and be self sufficient. .... h3 Posted Sunday 16th December 2012 14:35 GMT

    That post is most contradictory and conflicted, h3. And surely your conclusion should be that the reason the US is currently so weak is that they/it do nothing along those lines.

    * Events, Dear Boy, Events

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