Thursday, October 23, 2008 – 1:39 PM PDT Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal
Aling Technologies Inc., announced a restructuring plan that will cut 111 job cuts.
Align (NASDAQ:ALGN) said the job losses in its Santa Clara headquarters will take place between now and January 2009. The remaining positions will be eliminated over the next few quarters as the company creates a new shared services organization in its existing Costa Rica operation that will consolidate customer care, accounts receivable, credit and collections, and customer event registration organizations.
Align’s Treat Operations facility has been in Costa Rica since 2002. It consists of 670 clinical technicians and support personnel and “provides a solid foundation to build a shared services organization that will create greater efficiencies by enabling the company to leverage the existing infrastructure and the talent base in Costa Rica at a lower overall cost,” Align said.
CEO Thomas Prescott said the plan “builds on the cost saving actions we announced in July. The majority of what we are doing is structural and many valued employees are affected. These actions, while difficult, are essential to Align becoming a more efficient company and will result in a more robust operating model with room to invest for future growth.”
As part of these actions, Align will record a restructuring charge estimated to be approximately $5 million, of which approximately $3.5 million will be realized in the fourth quarter and the remainder over the first half of 2009.
As of Sept. 30 Align had approximately 1,400 employees.
Google has been a technological leader in the 21st Century.One of the quantum leaps of Google has been to make information is available to everyone around the globe at the snap of a finger.It’s hard to go back and imagine how it would be without Google.
Another revolution has been Google commitment to help builds a clean energy future.
Google believes that we need to accelerate the development and deployment of cost-effective energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies in order to achieve deep and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
To this end Google advocates:
Use energy more efficiently, allowing us to do more with less (Its also the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.) Investments in efficiency are often win-win, sometimes paying for themselves in just months
Require that utilities produce a specific percentage of electricity from renewable energy
Spur the innovation necessary to meet today's critical environmental, economic and security challenges by investing on renewable energy, energy efficiency and advanced transportation technologies.
Given the fact that that more than close to 80% of the Electric Energy in the United States comes non renewable sources, Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energies to reduce Google’s own mounting energy costs to run its vast data centers, while also fighting climate change and helping to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Companies in Costa Rica that pledge to fight climate change, only need to plug in to the electric grid and take advantage of the fact that over the last ten years Costa Rica has produced between 91% to 99% of its Electric Energy from renewable sources including Hydroelectric, Geothermal, Wind and Biomass.
Costa Rica has built over years the infrastructure to help its business community lead the efforts to figth Climate Change.
Green power, protection of tropical forestland contribute to carbon neutrality By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 08/07/2008
Dell says it has met its goal of becoming “carbon neutral” through a series of initiatives to reduce its own energy consumption and offset carbon emissions around the world.
Dell was the first major computer-maker to announce such a plan last September, when it said it would make all company-owned and -leased facilities carbon-neutral by the end of 2008, the IDG News Service reported at the time. Carbon neutrality involves offsetting carbon emissions with projects that limit or sequester emissions, often through such projects as planting trees; or purchasing carbon offsets, in which a company essentially pays others to limit their own carbon.
Dell on Wednesday said it has met its carbon-neutral goal, a few months ahead of schedule. “We’re driving ‘green’ into every aspect of our global business,” said CEO Michael Dell in a statement. “This includes setting new standards for energy efficiency and green power, delivering environmental and cost savings for customers, and aligning key growth priorities with our focus on preserving our shared Earth.”
Dell entered a partnership with Conservation International to protect more than 591,000 acres of tropical forestland in Madagascar that otherwise might have been destroyed, preventing a half-million tons of carbon emissions over the next five years, Dell said.
Dell is powering its Texas headquarters entirely with green energy and since 2004 has increased its overall purchases of green electricity — including wind, solar and methane-gas capture — from 12 million kWh to 116 million kWh.
Dell’s carbon-neutral project also includes purchases of renewable energy certificates and new investments in wind power in the United States, China and India.
“The company is already saving more than $3 million annually and avoiding nearly 20,000 tons of [carbon dioxide] through facilities improvements and a global power-management initiative,” Dell says.
A study by McKinsey in October of 2008 assessed the impact of carbon mitigation on benchmark companies in the aluminum, automotive, beer, construction, consumer electronics, and oil and gas industries.
They modeled their sensitivity to regulatory moves, technological shocks, and shifts in consumer demand and analyzed the potential impact on the cash flows and 2008 net present value. The events in these companies and sectors were examined in the context of their carbon intensity, geographic footprint, and ability to pass through costs and to redeploy capital.
In some industries, shifts in demand would have a broadly negative impact on company cash flows and therefore valuations. Oil and gas consumption, for example, would experience falling demand over the long term as the economy shifts toward cleaner sources of energy (including solar, wind, and carbon capture and storage), and as oil-consuming sectors (such as automotive and power generation) increase their emphasis on energy efficiency. They concluded that valuations would fall by around 5 to 15 percent depending upon the scenario.
By contrast, other industries could enjoy considerable gains. Companies in the building-materials sector—particularly those that do business in places where building efficiency is not yet a major issue—will probably benefit from rising demand for improved energy efficiency and insulation products, which will increase their cash flows. As compared with the business-as-usual scenario, the valuation of a representative building-materials company in the developed world increases by 35 to 80 percent depending upon the scenario. If more stringent regulatory measures do not materialize, valuations could fall by 10 to 20 percent as a result of possible short-term cost pressures.
Efforts to offset climate change will structurally transform certain sectors—including automotive and aluminum—which will experience more volatile returns and increased rates of entry and exit as new technologies or regulatory restrictions emerge and the competitive landscape changes.
As common sense would command, on given industries there will be winners and losers, depending upon the ability of the different companies to approach the challenge. Companies that address the challenges in a creative and innovative way would develop strengths that could help on their margins and thus their cash flows and valuations.
Some sectors will experience minimal long-term stress from carbon-abatement efforts: they will be able to pass along any short-term cost pressures to customers and will not face substitution by other products or significant shifts in demand. In such cases, profit margins would revert to average levels over the medium to long term. The consumer electronics industry, for example, will probably have the technology to deal with regulation in a way that will not harm the bottom line.
As nations and companies start acting more aggressively to reduce carbon emissions, major shifts in the valuations of sectors and companies will start to become clearer and more predictable. Over the next 18 to 24 months, a number of regulatory and policy events, such as the December 2009 Copenhagen conference to replace the Kyoto treaty, will probably reduce the uncertainty and spark a rethinking of how carbon reduction efforts will affect valuations across a wide range of industries.
Several steps can help companies and their executives as they start to position themselves to thrive in a low-carbon economy:
Review the company’s exposure to regulatory measures (such as carbon pricing, new standards, taxes, and subsidies), new technology, and changes in consumer behavior
Develop a consistent strategy, informed by analysis and to engage with policy makers to help shape/understand the policies and regulations
Generating more sophisticated forecasts and deeper insights into climate change–related developments.
Decisions about new corporate investments should be geared toward carbon- and energy-efficient technologies that will remain competitive over investment life cycles
Network around knowledge centers (venture capital firms, universities, scientists) that can help companies understand and manage the impact of climate change and develop technology
Companies will need to focus on how and when to signal the value of their climate change bets so that investors can assess them. Each company will have to explain its overall level of preparedness for the future, the way climate change–related events could affect its specific cash flows, and what differentiates it from its competitors in these respects.
So far very few public companies have succeeded in explaining the more deeply hidden effects of climate change on their cash flows and competitive strategies.
An easy first step that Corporations can take is to engage with companies that have already started their efforts to mitigate Climate Change in their chain of supply.
