Posted 10/28/09 at 01:35:31 PM by Paul Lilly

At nearly 10 percent, the unemployment rate is the highest it's been in 26 years, or a little over a quarter of a century. Nevertheless, SMBs are looking to the coming year with optimism and planning to hire rather than lay off more workers, suggests a new study.

Intuit Payroll pinged over 1,000 SMB owners and found that 44 percent have plans to hire in the next year, and 60 percent are expecting their businesses to grow. But there's also a bit of a quandary SMBs find themselves in.

Nearly 90 percent of the survey participants indicated health insurance benefits as key to attracting and retaining good employees, but 58 percent don't offer healthcare benefits, with nearly half saying they simply can't afford it.

"There's a wideing gap of expectations," said Nora Denzel, senior vice president of Intuit's Employee Management Solutions Division. "On one hand, we as a society assume that health and retirement benefits are part of every employee's compensation package. And yet even as these small businesses gear up to hire, according to our results, small businesses are leery about what those benefits will cost."

Intuit also found that only 1 percent of respondents reported receiving federal stimulus money, even though 74 percent admit that they are probably not taking advantage of all the benefits made available to them under the federal economic stimulus plan.

Read More

Posted 10/10/08 at 09:41:59 AM by Paul Lilly

Cheap memory prices are taking a toll on chip manufacturers, with Micron last week reporting a $344 million fourth quarter loss, the seventh quarter in a row the company has been in the red. The fallout of another quarterly loss was to fall on the shoulders of executives, who Micron said would see a 20 percent pay cut. Now it appears it won't be enough.

In addition to the high level pay cuts, Micron now says it plans to reduce its global workforce by about 15 percent. The job reduction is part of a restructuring plan and will be rolled out over the next two years with most of the cuts taking place in Boise, Idaho.

"The combination of declining customer demand and product oversupply in the marketplace has driven selling prices for NAND flash memory significantly below manufacturing costs," Micron said in a statement.

Because of this, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), which is a joint venture between Micron and Intel, will stop producing NAND flash memory from Micron's Boise facility, a move that will reduce IMFT's flash production by about 35,000 wafers per month.

Read More