Paul,
I totally agree with you. As I have mentioned before, I live only about 5 miles from the new Tewksbury, MA manufacturing site for Jabil. It looks like it is ready for business. I'm sure we will here all about it in the next conference call when earnings come out. I think this building is going to do a ton of work for Nortel. It just happens that Bay Networks(Nortel)is located just a few miles from this new Jabil manufacturing site. About 10 years ago I interviewed for a job at ACT Manufacturing(ACTM) in Hudson, MA. They have a very nice building, but like you said they have NO global presence and a lot of debt. I for one would not like to see Jabil buy this business. I think it would only hurt them. One thing I do know is that they use to do a lot of cable assemblies for EMC, another company close to my home-town of Tewksbury. I presently work for a small contract manufacturing company in Lowell, MA. We are so busy it's not funny. I'm a component engineer by trade, but when we lost 2 purchasing people they shoved me into a purchasing role, responsible for the biggest account the company has. I'll tell you one thing, it has been an experience. I'm learning all about allocation and delivery times. If anything is going to hurt the contract manufacturers it will be allocation and delivery times for certain components. The components that are really being affected right now and are very hard to get in a short amounts of time are crystal oscillators, tantalum capacitors, and certain IC's. I think everyone is really guessing as to what Jabil will do. Only time will tell, but I really think Jabil will come out smelling like roses. The only thing I'm not certain of is how fast they want to expand. Do you think they will take it slow or do you think they will go on an all out expansion an and buying blitz? |
