Originally posted by Makosuke
This is a relatively baffling move, if you ask me; Gateway is bleeding cash all over the place, trying and failing to move into consumer electronics, and even their PC shipments are declining steeply. They're basically dying, and dying fast.
FWIW, I was looking at an eMachines laptop before I got my iBook, and people at the ePinions type sites were saying they were all pleasantly surprised after buying it -- there were little quality problems (a lot of the early ones had one of the LED indicators miswired so it lit for the wrong thing), but overall, it was a nice package for the price and fairly good looking and sturdy.
I think this move has a lot to do with numbers. While the Gateway CEO will remain chairman, Wayne Inouye from eMachines is going to become CEO and run the day-to-day business. In an article I saw somewhere, this is the statistic I saw...Gateway has about 7000 employees and makes about $400k in revenues per employee. eMachines did $1B in business in the last year with*130* employees...meaning they sold >$8M for every employee.
Also, it sounds like Inouye has a very strong customer focus, and was responsible for making the more recent laptops, etc, much better than earlier eMachines. This is hard to believe because he came from Best Buy, but that's what everyone says....
What I think: this is basically a bid to push Gateway into more customer oriented devices (esp laptops) with higher margins, and to improve their ability to manage supply chain remotely.
Look for a lot of those 7000 people to lose their jobs in the next year.
