AmericaOverland
Explorer
Why do they need to sell more? What's wrong with current production numbers? What's wrong with staying steady on those numbers? What happened to the idea of stability at a company? After all, the executives get to go home to their estates, and the workers get to go home to their decent homes and do what they do on the weekends. Why change this? UNLESS, somebody got greedy and wants more. People don't know how to be happy with what they have. Always remember that "As fast as you go up on a stock market-like chart for production or company performance, must you come back down in a return to the mean." Markets ALWAYS show this eventually. I have seen very few companies that try to accept that "This is where we're at, we're doing pretty good, so let's keep it where it's at so that we don't suffer 'market saturation' and end up laying off people in a hurry when there is no longer a reason to manufacture at the present rate. Let's manufacture just enough to sell and keep parts and maintenance staff on hand to keep this going."
Market saturation is always the fatal flaw in business models. Always. This means that at the current rate of production, you reach market saturation (say, 90% of the population own a Jeep Wrangler or a Droid phone) very quickly, and because you don't have more people to sell your Jeeps to than what the market can bear for opportunities, production has to fall off in a hurry to minimize over-inventory. So, the faster you reach market saturation, the more disrupting the layoffs/capital disallocation has to be to offset the lost demand and bring things back in balance. The more even you keep production numbers even in a slight incline over the life of a product, the more likely you are to survive market saturation as you transition from "mainly manufacturing, some maintenance" to "some manufacturing, mainly parts-making, and maintenance."
Otherwise, your only alternative is to manufacture products with short lives or different versions of a product that makes it compelling enough for customers to "have to buy" to replace what they already have.
Lots of businesses don't know how to transition from a growth phase to a maintenance phase. These businesses ALWAYS assume that they will be in a growth phase forever, and they run into trouble when they don't successfully make the transition. As a business, what are you going to do when every single developing country becomes a developed country, with the majority of the peoples having what they need? You would no longer enjoy the kind of growth you experienced when your product category did not exist before. Here is where you will be forced to learn what I'm talking about.
Creating new versions of an existing product is very expensive. There's the cost of hiring engineers to come up with a new design and retooling the assembly lines after existing business relationships have been changed/new ones formed. It's very expensive to do this all over again. I love the classic Land Rovers and their history. Because the Land Rovers have mutated into Lunar Rovers designed by the wrong people for the wrong kind of people, I can't ever bring myself to buy one of these given what I already own.
Somewhere, somehow, we took the corner from a time when designs didn't change for a very long time (because it did the job, what did it matter) to where nearly everything goes from nonexistent to market saturation in mere months and back to nothing when no one wants it for a better model. This world has gone absolutely nuts.
Lunar Rovers... Interesting... Jeep Wrangler becomes Jeep Astronaut? Check out the features available on a 2012 model. Toyota Landspeeder? Ford Sprinter becomes Ford Apollo?
Someone needs to stick around to specifically make a vehicle that remains a base model with few features and high durability for heavy-duty/utilitarian/off-road use.
