avr microcontrollers free samples
Oct 24 2008
Microchip stopped sampling globally
If you look at the company's financials, you'll understand:
stock price at the lowest level in over 5 years, and has recently dropped about a third of its value. Income was flat 2007 to 2008, after showing steady climb in previous years. Yet their R+D expenses grew by 30 million. Investors are feeling that their R+D is not generating new sales, and are punishing the company.
When stock prices fall like that, it causes hundreds of millions of dollars of stock value losses to the top tier executives, who usually own A LOT of stock, so OBVIOUSLY, every department in the company is asked to review their operations.
First instinct in the sampling department is to put all sampling on hold until the top gouys can have a meetng, figure out what to do, decide what's their next move, have another meeting, figure out how to sugar-coat the overall picture to the shareholders, etc, etc.
Things move slowly in a large corporation, and in any event, Marketing will generally suggest trying a run without sampling to see if it makes an impact on sales.
The smallest granularity of time in corporate business, is a quarter ( 3 months), so they will suggest one or 2 quarters without sampling to assess the effect.
After this , they will meet again, and if sales are lower ( probably due to factors unrelated to sampling) some guy at the table might say "See??!!.. I told you we would lose sales if we stopped the program..." If sales are higher, somebody might say " Hey, we're getting the money in...Let's re-start the sampling program to bring even more sales in..". These and other similar comments will be largely unfounded and irrelevant, since noone can scientifically compare 3 months of samples to the same 3 months withoiut samples in financial terms --you would need to use 2 identical, parallel Universes to conduct that experiment, and we don't have that.
So you can expect sample blackouts like this to last from 4-8 months ( 1-2 quarters, + time for meetings) and the outcome to be largely influenced by some subjective, best-guess estimates of what will make the numbers look better in the annual report.
Keep in mind that the cost of 500 students abusively ordering samples is about $50,000, while Microchip's yearly losses from sales of capital equipment and other small mistakes they made is 2-3 million dollars, which is , in turn, the smallest loss number on their financial statements, amidst revenues of $1.1 billion, and overall expenses of $240 million.
Whether they sample or not, that cost is below the noise floor in their annual reports.
National Semiconductor stopped sampling for 3 months in 2007 (Sep-Nov). Fairchild stopped sampling for 7 months in 2007 ( Apr-Nov). The process is the same.
Added after 33 minutes:
One more thing:
The guy(s) in charge of sample administration is in a precarious position.
If he comes to an operations meeting armed with documentation that shows the sample program is being misused -- that's the end of the sample program. AND ... that's the END OF HIS JOB
In good economic times, when companies are generally hiring, that employee could be confident that, if his department closes, he will be re-staffed in another department.
BUT TIMES ARE BAD currently. Companies are NOT hiring, but starting to shrink staff.
IF his department closes, there will most likely NOT be another position waiting for him elsewhere in the company, that he qualifies for.
This is the equation
GOOD Times= more sampling = sampling department jobs
BAD times= no sampling = no samplng jobs.
That guy needs to be smart, to look after his own interests too.