«Байер» перестраивается

Руководство германского конгломерата «Байер» (Bayer) заявило, что приступает к реструктуризации своего бизнеса. «Байер» сконцентрирует усилия исключительно на европейском рынке фармацевтической продукции, а его подразделения по производству полимеров и весь химический бизнес будут выделены в новую химическую компанию.

По словам генерального директора «Байер» Вернера Веннинга, бизнес обновленной компании будет зиждиться только на трех китах: лекарственные препараты и медицинское оборудование, сельскохозяйственная химия и промышленные материалы.

"После реструктуризации компания «Байер», оборот которой будет составлять порядка $25 млрд, сможет уделить больше внимания основному бизнесу, в котором мы располагаем прекрасными технологиями, сильными позициями и, прежде всего, перспективными направлениями", — заявил журналистам после заседания совета директоров Вернер Веннинг.

Направления, которые Веннинг назвал перспективными, обладают большими возможностями роста, но при этом требуют крупных затрат на научные исследования, из-за чего компания оказывается не в состоянии поддерживать свой бизнес по производству химических веществ.

Поэтому было принято решение выделить химический бизнес «Байер» в новую компанию «НьюКо» (NewCo). Штаб-квартира новорожденной будет располагаться по соседству со штаб-квартирой «Байер». В начале следующего года «НьюКо» уже проведет первичное размещение акций.

Решение о кардинальной реструктуризации бизнеса «Байер» было принято после двух лет безуспешных поисков партнера для фармацевтического подразделения. Многие аналитики полагают, что фармацевтический бизнес «Байер», слишком мал, чтобы составить достойную конкуренцию крупнейшим корпорациям.

Ведомости

UNIT 4

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Nokia's next act Can the Finnish giant stay on top in an age of commodity phones and stalling sales?

The get-togethers were cordial and businesslike, the agenda ambitious. There were no raised voices, no objects hurled against the wall. And above all, there was no sense of panic. But in a series of meetings starting last summer, the top five executives of Nokia Corp., the world's No. 1 maker of mobile phones, hammered out a strategy to remake the $28 billion company's handset business from top to bottom. A decade after Nokia chucked its heritage as a maker of everything from toilet paper to rubber boots and bet its future on wireless communications, it was time for the next act.

The immediate objective was to deal with the consequences of dramatic slowdown in sales both in the industry and at Nokia itself. The top brass also had to face up to resurgent competition from rivals left in the dust years earlier and the threat posed by Asian manufacturers. Then there was a challenge from software behemoth Microsoft Corp. Its push to get phone makers to adopt a stripped-down version of its Windows software threatens to erode Nokia's power.

At every meeting, Chairman and CEO Jorma Ollila would throw out a hypothetical proposal. "What if Nokia expanded from two to four business units?" he asked the group. "What if the company merged manufacturing of mobile phones and networking equipment to reap new economies of scale? Or what if it was reorganized along regional lines?" Each scenario was painstakingly picked apart — and all but one was ultimately discarded. No slick management gurus were hauled in to provide the Big Think. As with virtually everything Nokia does, the solution was homegrown.

Just before Christmas, the executives settled on a scheme that Ollila is convinced will propel his company to the next level. Few in the industry know the details of the changes, which Ollila was set to outline for analysts on June 20. But they are already in place, effective May 1, Nokia split its monolithic $21 billion mobile-phone unit into nine profit-and-loss centers, each charged with bolstering the company's position in a particular market. There's always a risk that such a massive overhaul could slow down the 53,000-person company. But Ollila, 51, argues it will have the opposite effect. "We foresaw that being too big was a real danger," he says. "We had to break up the company in a meaningful way to retain the entrepreneurial thmst we had in the 1990s."

It's the next stage in the maturation of the mobile industry. Nokia gets credit from analysts and rivals alike for having been the first to grasp that cell phones were becoming consumer items. In the mid-1990s, it started segmenting its product line by "styles", such as Basic, Classic, and Fashion. But the mobile-phone division remained a single, increasingly unwieldy business unit. Now that old structure is gone, replaced by a stable of mini-Nokias. Heading them up is a new generation of managers, one of whom could some day graduate to CEO.

Pretty dramatic stuff for a company that's clearly on top, with an estimated 37% global share. But nothing equals Nokia's internal reorganization for symbolic import. Gone is the unified structure of a business that grew so fast nobody had time to consider alternatives. In its place, Nokia has conjured up a complex organization of separate businesses, each with its own product, R&D and marketing. One unit, for instance, will address the particular needs of business users, while another will chase the nascent market for phones with built-in digital cameras. Perhaps the boldest gambit is a unit focused on ultracheap phones for markets such as Russia, India, and China. The very existence of such a group is a tacit admission that the old Nokia lacked the focus to win this segment. "Nokia became its own worst enemy," says Juha Christensen, the vice-president of Microsoft's mobility group. "By having vast economies of scale, it lost the ability to deal with niche markets."

The changes at Nokia parallel those that have occurred in other industries. By the 1920s, Henry Ford had figured out that not every customer wanted a black Model T. But his rival Alfred P. Sloan Jr. gained the upper hand by building a General Motors Corp. that housed separate divisions — Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Cadillac — targeting different classes of buyers. It even happened to the most generic of all products, the microprocessor, when Intel split its Pentium line into three price brackets to focus engineering and marketing efforts on specific customers.

But GM had decades to perfect its system, and Intel enjoyed a near-monopoly with its microprocessors. Nokia has neither of these luxuries. That's why Ollila's reorganization is fraught with risk. Nomura International analyst Richard Windsor worries it could raise fixed costs. Plus the sheer complexity of it might — instead of producing nimble, market-focused teams — simply gum up the works and confuse employees, clients, and investors.

To keep the separate units from straying too far apart, all will tap the 4,500-person central research lab for basic-technology and product design. And to avoid diluting Nokia's efficiencies in procurement and manufacturing, each will hand off its products to a shared operations and logistics group.

Everybody who competes with Nokia will be watching its experiment with a mix of curiosity and dread. If it works, the rush to imitate will be swift and massive. If it doesn't — well. Nokia will have to work even harder to stay on top. One way or another, there's no going back to the Model T.

BusinessWeek

Note

Model T - the first best-selling car model made by Ford; smth in the past, foretime