Nearly one year ago, at its I/O developer conference, Google unveiled its Android-powered Nexus Q media player product to much fanfare. Little more than a month after the big reveal, Google suspended the launch of the Q indefinitely.

So, will Google’s I/O conference — set to kick off this Wednesday — bring news of the Nexus Q’s fate?

No, it won’t. Google won’t have any news on the Nexus Q this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Q’s notable absence over the past year is almost as big a deal as its initial unveiling. For Google, the Nexus Q was less a new product than it was a definitive statement; essentially, the search giant was saying that with the fully in-house-designed Q, Google, too, could create beautiful products, just like its greatest competitor, Apple, whose iPhones, iPads and computing devices are fetishized by technologists and design fanatics the world over.

What’s more, the Q was to be manufactured inside the U.S., a stark departure from so many consumer electronics companies whose devices are put together overseas in places such as South America and Asia. And the timing of the initial announcement couldn’t have been better for Google: As Apple was facing harsh criticism for working conditions and wages in overseas operations with partner manufacturing group Foxconn, Google reaped the public relations benefits of claiming to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. of A.

The Q was indeed attractive and well built, a matte-black sphere slightly smaller than a bowling ball, encircled in a thin strip of LEDs which alternated in color when interacting with other Android devices. It was sleek, stylish, an item that any design devotee would feel comfortable situating in the middle of their living room.

Aside from looking pretty, the Q didn’t do quite enough to warrant the hefty $300 price tag. The Nexus Q was for all intents and purposes a direct gateway to Google Play, the company’s Web-based media store which sells MP3s and videos to consumers. Link the Q up to your Wi-Fi network and it would be able to tap into a user’s online repository of Google-stored content. Users could control the Q with their Android smartphones and tablets and, ideally, hold listening “parties,” swapping songs in and out of the “queue” of tracks to be played.

However novel, the Nexus Q paled in comparison to devices from competitors like Microsoft, whose massively popular Xbox is capable of delivering all sorts of downloadable content like games, video and music. Apple, too, offers the Apple TV at a modestly priced $100, and is capable of delivering video and music from its iTunes online media store, as well.

As a result of a wave of immediate criticism, Google suspended the Q’s fate indefinitely, citing “initial feedback from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does today,” according to the company’s statement last July. Google said at the time that it was “postponing” the consumer launch rather than halting product development completely, in order to “work on making it even better.”

Indeed, Google will have to return with a strong product to compete in the battle for consumers’ living rooms, an assault waged across all fronts from the world’s biggest American technology companies. Two years ago, Google unveiled Android @Home, the company’s plan to extend Android-based devices into products like in-home lighting fixtures, signaling the company’s grand ambitions to bring Android out of its traditional mobile device roots.

While we’ve seen little progress in the way of news from Google’s @Home efforts since, Microsoft and Apple continue to push for greater market share with their device and content offerings. Even Amazon is reported to be working on its own set-top box, in order to stream its content directly into the homes of consumers.

So, at this week’s I/O, at least, we won’t be hearing about Google’s Nexus Q plans. But there’s always next year.

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The Indian government’s draft regulations, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, would require that a substantial percentage of technology hardware purchased by government agencies and some companies — ranging from Wi-Fi devices to network switches — come from India-based manufacturers. Foreign players would have to swiftly set up local factories to market their products here.

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The difference in labor costs is narrowing and local officials in America have been giving more financial incentives to companies setting up plants in the U.S., Mike McNamara, chief executive of Flextronics, said in an interview Friday. Mr. McNamara said he could even imagine some smartphones being made in the U.S. eventually. But he cautioned that the return of manufacturing to the U.S. is likely to be a “slow and evolving process” rather than a flood. Many obstacles remain, including relatively high U.S. taxes, health-care expenses and regulatory costs, he said.

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Occasionally reliable Taiwanese trade mag DigiTimes claims Apple is planning to move Mac mini production to one of manufacturing partner Foxconn’s U.S. facilities. Here at AllThingsD, we’ve heard similar chatter — nothing that would serve as hard confirmation, but enough to lend credence to the idea that Apple has at least considered the idea.

And certainly the Mac mini is a likely candidate for Apple’s U.S. production plans. It has fewer parts than the Mac Pro and iMac, and few “build-to-order” options, making it a better candidate for automated production. It’s also a relatively high-volume product, making it a good choice given the high upfront cost of establishing those automated production lines.

The flip side here, of course, is that the Mac Pro is an equally likely candidate for opposite reasons. It’s a low-volume product with high margins and a lot of “build-to-order” options. It’s also bulky and expensive to ship. Those, too, make a compelling argument for stateside manufacture.

Apple declined comment on plans to manufacture the Mac mini in the U.S..

Apple appears to be on its way to becoming the biggest employer in the Austin, Texas, area and may soon eclipse Dell. Having gotten under way in May with the construction on a new $16.5 million, 200,000-square foot building in North Austin to open by 2015, plus a second, $226 million, 800,000-square-foot office building due no later than 2025, Apple is required under a deal it reached with commissioners in Texas’ Travis County to hire no fewer than 3,655 workers on top of the 4,000 it employs in Austin now.

If current trends continue and Apple keeps adding people — and Dell keeps cutting, as it has been over the last few years — Apple will become the biggest job creator in Central Texas. The prediction comes from local economist Angelos Angelou.

The expected increase in Austin may or may not have something to do with Apple’s plans to shift some of its Mac manufacturing footprint to the U.S. and away from China next year. CEO Tim Cook disclosed the plan in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek and NBC last week, but first hinted about it in his appearance at D: All Things Digital in May.

And Apple is also responsible for indirectly creating a lot of jobs. Example: South Korean chip giant Samsung manufactures Apple’s A5x and A6 chips used in the iPad and iPhone at a factory outside Austin.

As with previous rounds of predictions he has made — like for 2011 and 2012 — some of what he predicts already kind of makes sense if you’ve been paying attention to the way things are going, but will become more pronounced in the coming year. Others are a little more surprising.

1. “Carryalongs” Dominate Global Computer Markets
Anderson lumps notebooks, tablets and everything in between into a category he has labeled “carryalongs,” and he says they will take their place as the largest segment of computing devices. “Surface and slates and iPads and Kindle Fire and Nexus 10 and everything else that’s got a 7-inch screen plus or minus an inch or so, will be the biggest category of computing device.” Okay, then.

2. Intel: Long Live the King, the King Is Dead
Intel may still be the biggest supplier of chips to the world’s computing devices, but if you look at prediction number one, you know that Intel doesn’t yet play a significant role in the “carryalong” market outside of traditional notebooks. “Qualcomm and ARM are the new William and Kate,” Anderson says. Intel is primarily a supplier to the world’s server vendors. With CEO Paul Otellini retiring in May, the one way out of its current troubles will be to name a new CEO with what Anderson says are “real tech chops.” Otellini, he says, “marked the first time a marketing guy got the CEO job at Intel. Before that they were all engineers, except Craig Barrett who was an operating guy.” Intel, he says, “has lost the consumer stuff, the handheld stuff, the slate and tablet stuff. All it has left are servers. It has lost the mastery that it had.”

3. Net TV Dominates
A majority of U.S.-based homes will have Internet-connected TVs and related products like AppleTV, Roku boxes and so on. This will fundamentally change the production of content in new and interesting ways, and the result will be a lot more cheaper content. “This is going to become what TV is, and the result is that the cable and satellite companies are going to have a tough time. With the exception of sports, this is the end of cable as we know it.”

4. The LTE vs. Fiber Battle Creates Regional Revolutions in Broadband
In certain regions where the only broadband Internet option is a DSL line, LTE wireless devices and services will become the standard replacement, where LTE service is available. “In most cases you’ll be paying more, but you’ll also be getting more. This is a really interesting flip in some regions. It will be interesting to see this fight because it has a lot to do with what’s in the ground.” It will mark the start of a fight between LTE and fiber optic technology that will take a decade to resolve and what Anderson says is a “real revolution” in broadband pricing and provision.

5. Google Gets Its Mojo Back.
Google’s efforts in email, video, smartphones, maps and driverless cars have in Anderson’s opinion opened up new long-term paths for expansion at Google. Having killed off several products and services that weren’t seen as core to its operations, Google will in 2013 look a lot more focused and powerful when compared to Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, he says. “Google has turned an important corner where after all the experimentation, it has created a number of true businesses where they have a foothold and terrific products, and there are more to come.”

6. The Driverless Car Becomes a Serious and Competitive Global Project
And speaking of Google’s driverless car, that’s going to become a thing over the long term. Volvo plans to become a player. It’s not just a curiosity, it will in the future become a real market, he says.

7. eBooks Are the books
Total ebook sales in dollars will beat adult paperback sales in 2013, Anderson says, and will continue on a growth trajectory toward dominating the entire book-publishing business.

8. Enterprise IT Struggles to Achieve Very Modest Gains
“Big Data” may be a big marketing cry that keeps people talking about enterprise IT, but combined sales of hardware, software and other enterprise tech will collectively grow very little on a global basis. “The year-to-year spending increase will be very small, maybe only 1 to 2 percent, even though the companies doing the spending are sitting on trillions in cash.” One exception: Security.

9. Hacktivists Rule.
Hacktivists like Anonymous and those like them will take on an increasingly important and, Anderson argues, permanent role in forcing political entities to become more transparent. They’ll cease being annoying and actually become a longer-term part of the political and cultural landscape. The result? After struggling to keep their secrets, governments will be forced, in time, Anderson says, to become more open.

10. Supply Chain Security Becomes a Major Factor in Global Technology Purchases
“Maybe all that outsourcing wasn’t such a good idea after all” will be the thinking of many CEOs who’ve spent the last decade or more arguing that lower production costs brought about by inexpensive labor costs in China, Taiwan and other countries will cause a big re-think over security concerns. Academic researchers in the U.K. claim to have found what many people have only silently worried might be possible: An unpatchable backdoor on a military grade encryption chip built in a Taiwanese fab. Companies in what he calls “inventing nations,” exasperated by the constant theft of intellectual property that is often traced to China, will grow increasingly uneasy at their relationship with that country and look for ways to bring more production back to their own shores. A new phrase — “clean supply chains” — will gain currency in tech manufacturing circles and will amount to an admission across many industries, not just tech, that today’s supply chain arrangements are “virtually all compromised,” Anderson says. This will lead to talk of ways to relocate manufacturing operations back in the U.S. and other countries. It won’t be easy — China will retaliate against companies that say anything like this publicly. “You almost have to decide to do what Google did and all but leave the country.” Apple is already doing it. Others, he said, will follow.

– Apple CEO Tim Cook and Walt Mossberg at D10, May 2012

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

“Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,” Cook said. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

Cook didn’t specify which of the company’s Macs will be produced in the U.S., but it’s a safe bet it’s the iMac. Already a few of the new 21.5-inch iMacs have shown up in the wild bearing “Assembled in USA” brands.

iFixit

For Apple, which has taken a lot of heat over the years for outsourcing much of its production to Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn, this is a big move, one that showcases the manner in which Cook is putting his mark on the company.

“I do feel we have a responsibility to create jobs,” he said. “I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job, but I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs. I think we have a responsibility to give back to the communities, to pick ways that we can do that … and not just in the U.S., but abroad as well.”

Speaking at a Sanford Bernstein conference yesterday covered by Bloomberg News, Otellini said that Intel’s board of directors will likely select an internal candidate to succeed him when he retires next year and not an external one. When Otellini’s decision to retire was announced last month, a lot of attention was paid to the fact that Intel said it would break with tradition and consider external candidates in addition to the internal ones already in the running. Trouble is, there aren’t many available executives who fit the bill.

Intel Chairman Andy Bryant more or less made it clear in comments to the New York Times that the “external candidate” language in the press release issued that day had more to do with covering the Intel board’s backside from a corporate governance point of view than anything else.

“It’s not up to me, but I think that’s the most likely outcome,” Otellini said at the conference, adding that he’s “very comfortable” with the internal people vying for the job.

If you’re not up to speed on who those candidates are, then you should go read this post from last month listing who’s who and why they’re in the running.

The smart money says the race will come down to COO Brian Krzanich and CFO Stacy Smith, with software chief Renée James representing the dark horse who would get the nod if Intel’s board decides to vary pretty substantially from its script.

The thing is, it won’t. Intel needs some radically new thinking in order to rise to the challenges facing it in the smartphone and tablet space. Having essentially conquered the first wave of the digital world by stomping all over every other challenger in the PC and server industry with its chips, churned out by its world-beating manufacturing expertise, it entered a new decade looking flat-footed in the face of its first existential threat in a generation: ARM.

There are now PCs running a variant of Windows with ARM-based chips inside them from vendors like Nvidia and Qualcomm. And while it’s still early to say, the perception in the marketplace is that these devices, not those with Intel chips inside them, have the momentum of the moment. Even Apple, Intel’s showpiece customer on the PC, is said to be close — and by close I mean arguably within a few years — of switching away from Intel chips to its own internally designed ARM-based chips on the Mac.

That leaves Intel with two strongholds: One vulnerable, one seemingly unassailable. The vulnerable one is the server space. The movements by many chip companies to harness new ARM-based designs to attack Intel’s dominance there will, I think, emerge as an important story in 2013.

The unassailable one is Intel’s manufacturing prowess. There is not a single entity on the planet that knows more about manufacturing chips, nor anyone that can do it anywhere near as well as Intel. In time, this fact will force Intel to become more of a foundry company than it has been before.

Consider some other comments that Otellini made at the Bernstein conference yesterday, as reported by Barron’s. Asked about the possibility of becoming a foundry — that is, a company that manufactures chips on contract for companies that don’t have their own chip factories — Otellini said:

We’re running a small foundry business. We are building up our capabilities. We don’t want to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. But for the right types of products, and not to enable my competitors, I would certainly consider it. There’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline. … I think it makes sense for us to have that kind of capability, particularly as our semiconductor lead gets wider over the rest of the industry.

Which brings me back to the dark-horse candidacy of Renée James to be Intel’s next CEO. A lot of the value that goes into chips is now coming from software. Chips are made to be computing engines, but they’re also programmable, and a lot of secret sauce that gets put into them comes not only from hardware but from software. Intel is still a manufacturing company, but it is also a software company and employs legions of software engineers — including but not limited to the McAfee security software division it acquired in 2010. Software will increasingly become as important a strategic advantage in the manufacturing and customization of chips as the technology itself. Why not put a software executive in charge?

Also, if there were ever a moment to go off the script that Intel has followed since the days of Andy Grove — wherein every CEO has served first as COO — and shake tradition just a bit, it might be now. Just a thought.

Previously known as iSuppli, and widely known for its so-called “teardown” analysis reports, IHS has just completed its teardown report on the Apple’s newest iteration of the tablet. The verdict: The base model, a Wi-Fi-only 16 gigabyte iPad mini, which sells for a starting retail price of $329, costs about $188 to build. Adding additional memory — the options are 32GB and 64GB — adds only incremental cost but a fair amount of profit, amounting to an additional $90 for the 32GB version and $162 per unit on the 64GB model. (I revised this paragraph. See my note below.)

Aside from the cost of materials — known in industry lingo as a Bill of Materials (BOM) — the teardown also revealed the identities of several key suppliers on the latest device. The most visible component is the 7.9-inch touch-sensitive display.

LG Display and AU Optronics were found to have supplied the display components. Parts related to the display cost about $80, or about 43 percent of the total BOM. The screen uses a new technology known as GF2 that allows the overall display to be thinner than on previous generations. Andrew Rassweiler, an IHS analyst and head of the company’s teardown team, says that the new technology is proving somewhat problematic to manufacture, which is, for the moment, driving costs on the display up. But as kinks in the manufacturing process are worked out, those costs will come down.

Samsung continued its role as the manufacturer of Apple’s A5 processor, maintaining a longstanding relationship that dates back several years and predates the bitter, multi-jurisdictional series of patent lawsuits between them.

However, wherever Apple has a choice to buy components from other suppliers not named Samsung, it appears to be doing just that. Memory chips and displays, a portion of which have, in previous generations of iOS devices, been purchased from Samsung, appear to be coming from other players. This also appeared to be true of the iPhone 5, released earlier this year.

The sample iPad mini examined by IHS contained flash memory chips from Hynix Semiconductor, another South Korean chipmaker, and Japan’s Elpida supplied the system memory. Memory chips amounted to $15.50 of the materials cost of the iPad mini, IHS says.

Other components have been seen before, Rassweiler says. Cirrus Logic supplied an audio chip, STMicroelectronics supplied the accelerometer that detects when the iPad is moving and thus tells the display to reoriented, whatever it is showing. As usual, the identity of the camera suppliers are all but impossible to determine. Broadcom supplied some wireless chips that were assembled into a combined wireless module by Murata.

Update: I revised a paragraph up there where I misread something in the notes from IHS: If 16GB of memory goes for $15.50, then it follows that 32GB adds only $31 in additional cost, and $62 for 64GB. The figures I used referred to direct profit. Sorry about that.

Here’s her question, which you can find on page 48 of the transcript:

Crowley: Mr. President, we have a really short time for a quick discussion here. IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China, and one of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?

The correct answer is that, under current conditions, which are highly unlikely to change no matter who is president, the job of assembling iPhones and iPads and other consumer electronics is now done mostly in China by companies that specialize in manufacturing, and will never come back to the U.S. And that’s okay.

Sadly, both Obama and Romney flubbed their answers, and educated voters not at all.

Romney made his response about how China is a currency manipulator and steals American intellectual property. Obama got started down the right path, correctly admitting that certain low-skilled jobs aren’t coming back, and mentioned “high-wage, high-skilled jobs.” But he failed to close the deal on his point. He then got off track talking about investing in research and training engineers. In part because the time was so short, neither delivered a clear correct answer about an issue that is widely and fundamentally misunderstood by most voters.

Here’s what one of them — either one, I don’t care which, and assuming no time limit — should have said in response:

“Candy, I understand how some people might get frustrated when they see Chinese workers assembling iPhones. It’s easy to think that those jobs rightly belong in America. The reality is a little more complex, but when you understand it, there’s a surprising amount of good news for American workers.

“The fact is, assembling iPhones and iPads is the final step of a complex process, and is really a low-skill, low-cost kind of job. China has spent decades building much of its economy around these low-skill jobs, in part because it has such a large labor force and plenty of workers who are willing to do the work. And, frankly, here in America you wouldn’t want to try to support a family on the kind of wages a job like that would pay. I know it sounds harsh, but it’s true. So I know this may sound odd when I say it, but I ask you to hear me out: I’m perfectly comfortable letting those kinds of jobs go to China or somewhere else.

“In fact, some researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that for every iPad or iPhone manufactured, Chinese workers add $10 or less to the value of an iPad or iPhone. On an iPad, they found that American workers add $162 worth of value, and on an iPhone it was more than twice as much.

“In America, when we talk about manufacturing, we should be talking about advanced manufacturing jobs for highly skilled workers that require a solid education and pay wages on which you can support a family. And the fact is, there’s a lot of American work that goes into an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac.

“For one thing, there’s our semiconductor companies, like Intel, an American company that makes the most advanced and complex device ever created — the microprocessor — and that does it better than any other company in the world. It makes the primary brain that goes inside the Mac, most of the world’s personal computers and most of the servers that power the Internet. And most of those chips are made right here in California and Arizona and Oregon. Some are made in Israel, too. But most are made here in the U.S.A.

“And the microprocessors that go inside the iPad and the iPhone are made right here in America, too. Apple doesn’t make its own chips, and when it went looking for another company to help it do that, it picked a Korean company called Samsung. And where did Samsung decide to build these chips? Some place in Korea? No. The answer will surprise you: Texas. That’s right. Samsung operates one of its very biggest chip factories in Austin.

“Then there’s the shatter-resistant glass that you touch every time you use an iPhone or iPad. It was invented in America. And it’s made in America, too, by American workers at a company called Corning, in Kentucky and New York.

“And that’s just one piece of it. There are a lot of other great jobs held by American workers. Apple has a lot of smart designers who sweated over every little detail of how the iPad and iPhone look, and how they feel in your hand, and how the button works. Teams of software developers slowly, painstakingly designed and built and tweaked and refined the software that makes it so fun and useful.

“And we’re not done there. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you have a favorite app. Right now, my favorite app is the one created by my campaign staff. And when I take a break on the campaign bus, my wife and I like to relax for a few minutes playing Words With Friends. She beats me every time. And how many apps are there? A million? A zillion? But that’s an example of another American company, Zynga, creating jobs for the people who create game software. And there are lots more Zyngas, some of them really small companies with just a few people, and some a lot bigger. Apple once counted, and said that there were more than 200,000 people working at jobs just making apps.

“And let’s not forget that just a little more than five years ago, this branch of the technology industry didn’t exist at all. Apple brought out the first iPhone in 2007, and the first apps started coming to the marketplace in 2008. And don’t get me started about Google and its Android phones and tablets, and the chips and software that go into those. Or Facebook, and all the interesting things it’s doing.

“So, to answer your question, Candy, I’m not terribly worried that American workers aren’t assembling iPhones and iPads in America. They’re busy doing more important jobs, and earning good wages doing it right here in America. And as president, I’ll do everything in my power to help encourage the creation of more jobs right here in America, and to encourage entrepreneurs to start new companies so they can create the next Apple or Google or Intel or Facebook.

“It’s something we in America do better than anyone else. And we can argue about the details of how we should go about doing that. My opponent and I have some strong differences of opinion on some of those things we might do, and you should learn about those differences and think long and hard about them, because they’re important. But, over the long term, when I look at the iPhone and the iPad, I see something that could only have happened in America. And I feel pretty good about the role the American worker plays in it. And so should you.

“Next question.”

=====
Update: A few people have pointed out that President Obama in his response to Crowley’s question got off to a better start than I initially gave him credit for. However, I don’t think he quite closed the deal on the argument. Then, owing I think in part to the tight time constraints, he got off track. Either way, I’ve adjusted that lead-in paragraph above to reflect this.

For the sake of discussion I’ve added the text of the full exchange below.

CROWLEY: Mr. President, we have a really short time for a quick discussion here.
IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China, and one of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?

ROMNEY: The answer is very straightforward. We can compete with anyone in the world as long as the playing field is level. China’s been cheating over the years, one, by holding down the value of their currency, number two, by stealing our intellectual property, our designs, our patents, our technology. There’s even an Apple store in China that’s a counterfeit Apple store selling counterfeit goods. They hack into our computers. We will have to have people play on a fair basis. That’s number one.

Number two, we have to make America the most attractive place for entrepreneurs, for people who want to expand a business. That’s what brings jobs in. The president’s characterization of my tax plan …

OBAMA: How much time you got, Candy?

ROMNEY: …. is completely … is completely false.

CROWLEY: Let me go to the president here, because we really are running out of time. And the question is can we ever get — we can’t get wages like that. It can’t be sustained here.

OBAMA: Candy, there are some jobs that are not going to come back, because they’re low-wage, low-skill jobs. I want high-wage, high-skill jobs. That’s why we have to emphasize manufacturing. That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing. That’s why we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the best science and research in the world.

And when we talk about deficits, if we’re adding to our deficit for tax cuts for folks who don’t need them and we’re cutting investments in research and science that will create the next Apple, create the next new innovation that will sell products around the world, we will lose that race. If we’re not training engineers to make sure that they are equipped here in this country, then companies won’t come here. Those investments are what’s going to help to make sure that we continue to lead this world economy not just next year, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now.

The Taiwanese company, which also uses the trade name Foxconn Technology Group, said that it had employed interns as young as 14 at its campus in Yantai, in the northeastern Chinese province of Shandong, for approximately three weeks. Hon Hai said it took “immediate steps” to return the interns to their educational institutions.

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It wouldn’t be the first time that AMD will have been the subject of “takeover chatter,” so let’s inoculate ourselves against putting much faith in the speculation by taking a look at the possibilities.

The one name that has come up repeatedly is Qualcomm, though others are certainly mentioned from time to time, including PC maker Dell. But for the sake of keeping things simple, let’s stick with Qualcomm.

Known primarily as the supplier of chips for wireless phones, it has in recent years expanded significantly into supplying ARM-based processors for notebook PCs running Windows RT. Dell and Samsung are said to be customers of Qualcomm’s line of chips.

Qualcomm is said to covet the server market, where, not so long ago — well, about five years ago, anyway — AMD’s Opteron chips were competitive enough to cause significant headaches for the market’s perennial dominating force, Intel. AMD knows the server business well enough, the argument goes, that its expertise could be turned toward helping Qualcomm bring an ARM-based alternative to the server market.

AMD also has strong ties with chip foundries upon which Qualcomm and numerous other so-called “fabless” chip companies rely to build its chips. AMD has historical ties with the world’s second largest foundry, GlobalFoundries. That company is essentially the former manufacturing arm of AMD, spun out in a complicated transaction that included investments from the sovereign wealth funds of the Arab state of Abu Dhabi in 2009.

On top of that, AMD also owns a portion of the leading-edge 28-nanometer manufacturing capacity of the world’s largest chip foundry company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, a.k.a. TSMC. Qualcomm, the thinking goes, can’t help but be tempted, for the manufacturing relationships alone.

And with AMD shares trading within 92 cents of its most recent historic low, its market capitalization has dropped to below $2 billion. Even after assigning a gentleman’s premium of 50 percent, which it wouldn’t necessarily command, AMD could, given its valuation of $1.94 billion as of Friday, be taken out for less than $3 billion.

That’s cash that Qualcomm certainly has: As of June, its balance sheet showed combined cash and short-term investments of $13.4 billion, so on paper there’s no financial reason that prevents such a deal from getting done.

But there’s a big piece of the puzzle that most people who speculate about a deal such as this always forget to consider: AMD would be an incredibly complicated company to buy.

As anyone who knows their history of the chip industry will you, anyone who even thinks about buying AMD quickly learns that they will eventually have to deal with Intel. For decades, Intel and AMD have operated under a series of complicated and mostly secret patent cross-license agreements that give AMD access to the crown jewels of Intel’s intellectual property — the x86 instruction set.

The name dates back to the days when PC processors were known as “386″ and “486,” and are fundmental pieces of what makes a PC a PC. The patents are also important to servers, and as Intel has slowly worked its way into selling chips for some tablets and smartphones, to those devices, as well.

When AMD first sought to spin off its manufacturing operations into the company that became GlobalFoundries, Intel and AMD were in the middle of a bitter lawsuit. Intel argued, not without merit, that AMD couldn’t assign its access to the x86 patents without first getting Intel’s approval. Ultimately, they settled the dispute as part of a broader settlement hashed out in a series of difficult negotiations, with the help of a mediator on the Hawaiian island of Maui in late 2009.

Part of that settlement limits Intel’s behavior in such a scenario. It agreed to hold off on suing to block anyone seeking to purchase any of its competitors — AMD is really the only one — for one year, and negotiate first. The end result is that any company who reaches a deal in principle to buy AMD, will then have to turn right around and negotiate with Intel. And those negotiations could easily fail and send both parties to court.

So, on Monday, or whatever day the rumor mill starts churning out chatter that AMD is going to be taken out, don’t think too hard about it. It’s probably not true.

According to sources familiar with the company’s plans, (they asked not to be identified), AMD will announce next week that it will cut between 20 percent and 30 percent of its employees, which, given AMD’s headcount of about 11,700 11,100 workers, would amount to between 2,200 2,300 and 3,300 3,500 jobs.

The cuts, the sources said, will affect employees involved in engineering and sales, groups of employees that have been spared in previous rounds of cuts. Additionally, these people, who are familiar with the company’s operations, suggest that the cuts will be deep enough as to indicate that AMD may be forced to scale back some of its product offerings.

The cuts might be disclosed when AMD announces its quarterly results on Oct.18, or the announcement could come on Oct. 25, sources said. One source said the cuts may be completed by the 25th, at the close of a 10-day process.

CEO Rory Read is said to have brought in a team of business consultants from McKinsey & Company and BCG to advise the company. McKinsey’s role is said to involve handling the cuts, while BCG is said to be consulting on what one source described as a “grand strategy” to take the company forward.

One source described the mood within AMD as grim. Employees have been expecting the cuts for some time. “There are a lot of nervous people, and not a lot is getting done right now,” the source said.

A third source said that the scale of cuts may be lower, closer to between 10 percent and 20 percent of AMD’s workforce, which would imply a range of between 1,170 and 2,300.

An AMD spokesman declined to comment.

This would be the second major reduction in AMD’s workforce since Read took over as CEO. The company announced a 10 percent reduction 11 months ago. Those cuts amounted to about 1,400, and were necessary, the company said at the time, to reduce operating expenses by $118 million in 2012, and by $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The cuts will be announced during a period when AMD has been losing senior executives at a substantial clip. Last month, CFO Thomas Seifert was the latest to leave; he is, according to an informal count tabulated by AllThingsD the 26th from among the company’s senior ranks to depart since Read, a former executive at IBM and Lenovo, took over as CEO.

Update: I revised the range of numbers slightly after looking at AMD’s latest disclosed headcount of 11,100 from its 10K report, filed in February. Also CNet News published a story on the pending layoffs a little bit before I did.

The California Energy Commission on Wednesday approved a $10 million grant that Tesla is to use to expand manufacturing capacity for its forthcoming Model X SUV. Under the terms of the company’s agreement with the commission, Tesla will match the grant with $50 million of its own money and use the entire sum to keep Model X production rates high when it finally hits manufacturing in 2014. That will involve the hiring of 700 additional workers when the time comes — hopefully enough to avoid the slower-than-expected ramp-up that troubled the Model S sedan. And if all goes as planned, Tesla will take another step toward its goal of producing a truly mainstream electric vehicle. Not that the X is that car. Tesla says it will fall in the same price range as the Model S, which runs $50,000 to $70,000.

“Too often we’re portrayed in the press as only producing an electric sports car,” Mike Taylor, Tesla’s VP of finance, said today, according to Forbes. “I think that misses the point of what Tesla Motors is trying to do and why it’s important for California. Our mission has always been to aggressively promote electric vehicles for the masses.”

The world’s No. 2 personal-computer maker says the PC production line now being built at a facility in Whitsett, N.C., will allow the company to become more responsive to U.S. corporate clients’ demand for flexible supplies and product customization. Although the cost of U.S. production will be higher compared with overseas production, an added benefit will be to raise Lenovo’s profile in the U.S., where it ranks fourth in market share by shipment.

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The teardown analysis by the firm previously known as iSuppli is still ongoing this afternoon and not yet complete. But here’s what has been found so far: Memory chips from Sandisk are in the phone, in a possible sign that Apple is curtailing its purchases from memory chip maker Samsung as a result of the acrimonious legal fight still ongoing between them.

Flash memory chips used for storage are estimated to add between $10.40 and $41.60 to the cost of the device, depending on storage capacity. The iPhone also has $10.45 worth of DRAM memory.

Another iPhone part previously supplied by Samsung — the battery — appears to have been supplied by Sony. In both cases, it’s likely that Apple is buying both memory and batteries from more than one supplier. This means that Samsung memory chips and batteries may still be found inside some iPhones and not others. The battery in the iPhone 5 cost $4, down from $5.90 on the iPhone 4S, IHS says.

The iPhone 5 also contains a wireless processor from Qualcomm and touchscreen controller chips from Texas Instruments and Broadcom. STMicroelectronics maintained its role in supplying the gyroscope chip.

The parts used inside the iPhone 5 cost a combined $197 for the base model while the cost of assembly runs about $8 a unit. The iPhone sells for $199 to $399 with a two-year contract, but without a subsidy-bearing contract it sells for $649 for the base 16-gigabyte model, $749 for the 32-GB model and $849 for the 64-GB model.

The findings are more or less in line, if slightly lower than a preliminary cost estimate of $199 on the base 16-gigabyte model that IHS issued earlier this week. The cost estimates don’t take into account costs for other items, including software development, research and development, packaging, shipping or distribution. Apple declined to comment.

The latest estimate is fairly close to the cost estimate range of $188 to $207 that IHS issued last year on the iPhone 4S. Apple is selling the iPhone 5 for $199 for a 16GB unit, $299 for 32GB, and $399 for 64GB.

That $9 difference between the component cost for the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5 is important because it’s a relatively small difference between 3G and LTE or 4G phones, says Wayne Lam, analyst with IHS. “Most other phones built for LTE had much bigger displays, and everything got oversized. And that pushed the material costs higher,” he said. Apple’s screen is the same width as before, but is slightly longer than on the iPhone 4S.

Apple is also benefiting from a strategic investment in Sharp that paid off in the creation of a new in-cell touch-enabled display. The new display requires fewer layers than previous ones, and incorporates touch sensors directly into the display itself rather than using a touch-enabled overlay technology. The result, Lam says, is a display that is thinner than in previous generations of iPhone. The total cost of the display, IHS estimates, is $44, versus $37 on the iPhone 4S.

Another difference is in the wireless technology. With the iPhone 5 ready for LTE — Long Term Evolution — wireless networks, the cast of wireless chip suppliers has changed somewhat. Qualcomm supplied the primary wireless chip with additional chips coming from Skyworks Solutions, Avago Technolgies and Triquint Semiconductor. “We’re seeing a lot more parts from Avago and Skyworks this time around and only one from Triquint,” Lam said. The combined cost for the wireless components adds up to $34, up from $23.50 on the iPhone 4S.

There’s also a mysterious Apple-labeled chip that has not been seen in prior iPhones. Lam says it’s likely to be an audio chip of some kind. Apple is said to have been working on ways to improve audio and voice quality for phone calls.

In March, the firm took apart the latest iPad and came up with a range of estimates: $309 for the base Wi-Fi-only model to $409 for the higher-end 64GB 4G-ready model.

IHS regularly conducts teardown studies of wireless phones and other consumer electronics devices in order to find out who a company’s suppliers are. Like most manufacturers, Apple prevents its suppliers from identifying themselves publicly, much as they’d love to, so teardowns serve as confirmation of a relationship between a manufacturer and a supplier that is usually the subject of rumor and speculation.

The firm also estimates the combined cost of components — analysts check on the list prices of each part — to compile what is known in industry lingo as a bill-of-materials estimate, or BOM, that gives a fair idea how much a manufacturer, in this case Apple, makes in gross margin on each device sold. Apple doesn’t disclose its gross margin on a per-product basis, but when it reported its quarterly results on July 24, it said its overall gross margin was 42.8 percent.

In this case, the firm acquired five iPhones and disassembled them all. One thing the firm’s analysts were looking for was any variance in the identity of the memory supplier. Historically, Samsung, the world’s largest supplier of flash memory chips, has been a significant supplier — one of many — to Apple across its mobile product lines.

The Apple-Samsung relationship has been complicated by the epic series of smart phone patent lawsuits between them. Apple won a key round in the U.S. last month, winning a $1 billion judgment against Samsung in a federal court in San Jose, Calif.

Samsung still manufactures the A6 processor for Apple, continuing a relationship that dates back several years. Apple designs the chip. Early iPhone models contained processors designed and built by Samsung. IHS estimates the per-ship cost of the A6 to be $17.50 versus $15 for the previous generation’s A5.

IHS has also recently taken apart Nokia’s Lumia 900 and estimated its build cost at $209. Meanwhile, Google’s Nexus 7 tablet cost $152 to build.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120921/apples-iphone-5-is-pried-open-its-profitable-secrets-start-bursting-out/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120730/nokia-made-in-finland-no-longer/ http://allthingsd.com/20120730/nokia-made-in-finland-no-longer/#comments Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:00:47 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=235316 Nokia has manufactured its last handset in Finland.

Come September, the struggling cellphone maker will shutter its Salo, Finland, handset factory as part of its global overhaul intended to save €1.6 billion by the end of 2013. Nokia’s Salo facility is the company’s last remaining manufacturing plant in its home country. It produced its final handset last Wednesday.

Sad news for Finland and the 780 Salo residents who are losing their jobs, but a necessary move for Nokia, which is in the midst of a difficult transition to a Windows-based smartphone business.

The company is shifting handset assembly to its factories in Asia, where the majority of its component suppliers are based. And by doing so, Nokia expects not only to cut costs, but to bolster its long-term competitive strength.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market,” Niklas Savander, former EVP of Nokia’s Markets unit, said earlier this year. “By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

Nokia did not respond to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120730/nokia-made-in-finland-no-longer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120703/with-elpida-buy-micron-leaps-into-second-place-in-world-memory-market/ http://allthingsd.com/20120703/with-elpida-buy-micron-leaps-into-second-place-in-world-memory-market/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2012 13:45:05 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=227145 After buying the bankrupt Japanese memory-chip maker Elpida for about $2.5 billion, Idaho-based Micron Technology will jump into second place (behind Samsung) on the world market for memory chips, according to a market estimate by IHS iSuppli.

Micron was the fourth-ranked producer and Elpida third. Combined, they would leap ahead of South Korea’s Hynix into the No. 2 slot by revenue, and would have accounted for $1.54 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2012. Samsung reported DRAM sales north of $2.5 billion in the quarter.

It’s another step in the long-term consolidation of what has turned out to be the most difficult of all the segments of the chip business. DRAM — the memory chips that go inside PCs and servers — are essentially commodities, and thus subject to violent boom-and-bust cycles as demand spurs a round of building new factories. When all the manufacturers build new ones and upgrade the ones they already have, they finish just in time for demand to slack off.

And that usually hurts, because when demand crashes, and it always does, they’re left with two bad choices: One, let some of the new factory lines sit idle, for accounting purposes; or two, make as many chips as they can and compete with the other companies on price. Almost always, all DRAM companies choose option two, and flood the market with cheap chips.

The result is great news for consumers who can benefit by upgrading the computers they already own with relatively cheap chips; it’s also a boon for PC makers, who can add a lot of memory to the machines they sell without upping the price.

But it’s bad for the companies trying to make a profit on DRAM. It turns out that 2011 was one of those flood years, and in fact it was one of the worst in recent memory. It was so bad for DRAM companies that global sales of DRAM chips shrank by 25 percent, from nearly $40 billion in 2010 to less than $30 billion in 2011. This year, sales are expected to inch upward to about $30.5 billion, leading into another boom cycle next year, when demand is high, supplies are tighter and prices rise. And then it will go bust again.

Micron’s acquisition basically leaves the industry with three large players. The next two, after Samsung, Micron and Hynix, are Nanya and Winbond, both significantly smaller.

The deal also represents the end of a long-term goal for Micron. It has long wanted to own an Asian chip supplier in order to boost its scale and help it better ride out these extreme roller-coaster rides.

Way back in 2002, when Hynix was the problem child of the industry, racked by billions in debt and a crash in demand, it was essentially kept alive by support of the South Korean government. Micron offered it a lifeline in the form of an offer to buy $3 billion worth of Hynix’s memory operations. It was all worked out, until Hynix’s bankers insisted first on a corporate restructuring that caused the deal to fall apart.

It was about this time that the DRAM industry price-fixing scandal began. That summer, a U.S. federal grand jury started investigating pricing conditions within the DRAM industry and, within four years, executives with several companies, including Hynix, started serving prison terms.

Micron was implicated, too: An internal memo — revealed in a court filing, about which I first reported for Forbes in 2003 — showed that executives there were raising prices in cooperation with their competitors. One of its sales managers pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of justice associated with the investigation.

It also marks a second major development in what has turned out to be an eventful year for Micron. In February, its longtime CEO Steve Appleton was killed when the small plane he was flying crashed in Boise. Mark Durcan was named CEO the next day. I had known Appleton for years, and interviewed him a few times. He would have liked to have seen this day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120703/with-elpida-buy-micron-leaps-into-second-place-in-world-memory-market/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120627/made-in-the-u-s-a-with-nexus-q-google-brings-manufacturing-back-to-the-states/ http://allthingsd.com/20120627/made-in-the-u-s-a-with-nexus-q-google-brings-manufacturing-back-to-the-states/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:10:40 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=224954 It’s a familiar adage: All of the U.S. manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.

Google is bucking convention. The Nexus Q, Google’s first foray into designing and producing its own hardware in-house, will be manufactured inside the United States, not overseas.

Google isn’t disclosing the manufacturing locations, mostly for competitive reasons. But making the product from inside the States gives Google a leg up on overseas operations in terms of testing, tweaking and having more control over the product throughout the hardware design process. Instead of having multiple product managers fly back and forth between continents, directors of hardware Matt Hershenson and Joe Britt have more immediate access to the product, straight from the assembly line. (Wired has an excellent inside take on it.)

This is an obvious slap in the face for Apple, which most recently made headlines after controversial news involving its relationship with Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese partner manufacturers. Apple has spawned thousands of jobs creating iPads, iPhones and laptops overseas in China, with literal dormitories built to house the workers on Foxconn’s campus. What’s more, those working conditions aren’t regulated the way they are in the U.S., allowing for easier exploitation of workers and vastly reduced wages. Not so with Google’s manufacturing supply chain.

Of course, it’s likely that the Nexus Q will ship on a much smaller scale than Apple has set up for its hardware manufacturing chain, in part because it’s not clear what the demand for the Q will actually be. And, as we all know, Apple’s product demand soars.

But still, it’s a perfect time to win over those irked by Apple’s manufacturing methods. We’ll see if it shows in the sales numbers.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120627/made-in-the-u-s-a-with-nexus-q-google-brings-manufacturing-back-to-the-states/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120601/designed-by-apple-in-california-assembled-in-the-us/ http://allthingsd.com/20120601/designed-by-apple-in-california-assembled-in-the-us/#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 19:20:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=213827 Apple once operated a factory in the United States. Will it ever open another one? Will we ever see an Apple device labeled “Designed by Apple in California -– Assembled in the United States”? Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t sure, but he’s certainly open to the idea, though it’s not an easy one to execute.

“I want there to be [another U.S.-manufactured Apple product],” Cook said onstage at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference earlier this week, adding that some important pieces of a few of Apple’s devices are currently made in the States.

“This is not well known, but the engines for the iPhone and iPad are built in the U.S., in Austin,” Cook said. “The glass on the iPhone is made at a plant in Kentucky — and not just for the U.S., but for other markets outside the U.S. as well.”

But those are just a few components. And the bulk of them are not only manufactured outside the U.S., but assembled into Apple devices there as well.

Could assembly ever be done in the U.S.?

Said Cook, “I hope so, one day.”

But in order for that to ever happen, the U.S. really needs to up its game.

“The truth is the tool-and-die-maker skill in the U.S. began to go down in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Cook said. “How many tool-and-die makers do you know in the U.S. now? I could call a meeting and invite every tool-and-die maker in the United States and we wouldn’t fill this room.”

Not so in China, though. Said Cook, “In China you could fill a city with tool-and-die makers.”

So there’s significant work to be done if we’re ever to reach that “Designed by Apple in California -– Assembled in the United States” dream.

“There has to be some fundamental changes in the education system and the tool-and-die business in the United States to really bring consumer electronics assembly back to the U.S. But there are things that we can do, and that’s what we’re working on doing, and you can bet that we will use the whole of our influence to do it.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120601/designed-by-apple-in-california-assembled-in-the-us/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120529/cook-on-apples-role-in-china-and-manufacturing-i-hope-people-rip-us-off-blindly/ http://allthingsd.com/20120529/cook-on-apples-role-in-china-and-manufacturing-i-hope-people-rip-us-off-blindly/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 02:07:53 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=213740

Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world, keeping its product knowledge away from competitors, and close to the vest. But onstage at our annual D10 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook made it clear that there’s one area in which Apple wants to be as open as possible: Manufacturing.

“This is an area where I think we’re advanced,” Cook said in conversation with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. “And I hope people rip us off blindly.”

Natch, while Apple products are designed in Cupertino, they’re all built overseas in China, predominantly by Foxconn’s massive manufacturing resources. But after taking much heat earlier this year for the company’s role in how Foxconn treats its workers, Apple undertook massive reforms to its accountability process, switching gears from an annual report to monthly updates.

To boot, the company has “put a ton of effort into taking overtime down,” referring to the extreme number of hours Chinese workers put into working at Foxconn’s plants, though Cook admits it’s a tricky situation. “Some people want to work a lot,” Cook said. “Some want to work a whole lot. We’ve taken a position and said we’re going to bring this down.”

The idea, according to Cook, is that Apple now has a responsibility to be an agent of change; if all eyes are on how Apple conducts business overseas, then other companies with major manufacturing resources in China will follow suit.

“We think that transparency is so important in these areas,” Cook said, “If we are [transparent], we think that other people will copy what we’re doing.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120529/cook-on-apples-role-in-china-and-manufacturing-i-hope-people-rip-us-off-blindly/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/sony-panasonic-in-tv-tie-up-talks/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/sony-panasonic-in-tv-tie-up-talks/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 17:49:45 +0000 Daisuke Wakabayashi http://allthingsd.com/?p=208454 Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp. are in talks to jointly develop or produce next-generation flat-panel television sets, people familiar with the matter said Tuesday, in a move that aims to defray the heavy cost of manufacturing a new display technology.

The discussions center on a possible partnership for production or developing manufacturing technology for organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, television sets, the people said.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/sony-panasonic-in-tv-tie-up-talks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/silicon-valley-pioneer-kurtzigs-new-venture-her-timing-is-perfect/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/silicon-valley-pioneer-kurtzigs-new-venture-her-timing-is-perfect/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 14:00:48 +0000 Deborah Gage http://allthingsd.com/?p=203037 Last August, Sandra Kurtzig — one of Silicon Valley’s first female chief executives and the first one to take a technology company public — emerged from retirement with $10.5 million in funding and a new start-up: Kenandy, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., whose software is designed to manage manufacturing processes from the cloud.

Less than nine months later, she’s expanding, VentureWire has learned, adding financials and order management to Kenandy’s core software, changing the software’s name to Social ERP (for Enterprise Resource Planning) and targeting customers that make products.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/silicon-valley-pioneer-kurtzigs-new-venture-her-timing-is-perfect/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120419/amd-posts-590-million-loss/ http://allthingsd.com/20120419/amd-posts-590-million-loss/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:40:17 +0000 Ben Fox Rubin http://allthingsd.com/?p=198281 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. swung to a first-quarter loss as the chip maker continued to bear costs related to its spun-off foundry business, though its core earnings improved.

The company has weathered a series of problems lately, particularly chip shortages stemming from manufacturing problems at Globalfoundries, the company formed by the spinoff of AMD’s manufacturing operations. AMD last month restructured its relationship with Globalfoundries, triggering a $703 million charge for AMD but giving it more freedom to make some of its products elsewhere. AMD also agreed to give up its remaining 8.8 percent stake in the manufacturer.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120419/amd-posts-590-million-loss/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120322/nokia-completes-talks-on-planned-job-cuts/ http://allthingsd.com/20120322/nokia-completes-talks-on-planned-job-cuts/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:49:34 +0000 Anna Molin and Sven Grundberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=189221 Nokia Corp., the world’s largest handset maker by shipments, said Thursday it has completed negotiations with its labor unions over jobs cuts at its Salo plant in Finland.

The cuts are part of a plan announced last month to cut about 4,000 jobs at smartphone manufacturing plants at Salo, Reynosa in Mexico and Komarom in Hungary, in a push to move device assembly closer to components suppliers in Asia.

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