MIDAS, Itasca, Ill., the operator of car service shops, said it had agreed to sell some assets of its unprofitable exhaust system manufacturing division to ArvinMeritor, Troy, Mich., for about $2 million.
Since the middle of the last century, the city of Baltimore has struggled to regain its footing as key industries such as steel processing and car manufacturing became unprofitable or moved overseas.
But carmaking is a small and unprofitable part of a shrinking manufacturing sector, employing relatively few, in an economy dominated by services and resources.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, removed the trade barriers that could have made it unprofitable for a company to shift manufacturing abroad and sell the products back in the U.S. "It's long since the day when we might have expected a company to have loyalty to their workers," Baker said.
A CEO I know who uses biological principles to run a manufacturing firm that has never been unprofitable or laid off an employee in 30 years keeps a massive warehouse full of multiple copies of every part he's ever made.
The CEO's plan also includes shutting 11 of its 65 manufacturing plants and reducing or annihilating 15 unprofitable electronics operations by that same 2008 date.
If Huami were an independently run company designing, manufacturing, marketing and distributing its products, it would be unprofitable," wrote Smartkarma in a report into the listing.
Operating everything from vast soybean and cotton farms to hotels, soft drink, auto-manufacturing and shipping lines, they are seen as overstaffed, corrupt and generally unprofitable.
For manufacturing, it was all fairly clear, though there have been abuses, where companies take the money, build their washing machines or whatever for a few years, then declare the business unprofitable and bunk out.
