The big domestic economic news this week is the steep slide in stock prices for Sharp Corporation. Japan's leading liquid crystal display manufacturer has seen its shares fall 73 percent since the beginning of the year due to an oversupply of television sets in a world that no longer thinks Japanese home electronics are the best that money can buy.
The only thing keeping Sharp going at this point is its parts supply business, especially the deal it has with Taiwan-based company Foxconn, which assembles iPhones and iPads for Apple and uses Sharp-manufactured liquid crystal displays. Last week, Sharp announced it was eliminating 5,000 jobs from its worldwide 56,000-person workforce, the biggest employment cut in the company's history. It is also going to slash management salaries, including the president's, by 50 percent. Originally, it was only going to be 20 percent.
Even the electronics companies that are stable right now, like Toshiba and Hitachi, haven't escaped the downsizing trend; they just carried out their massive job cutting a few years ago, which is one of the reasons they're doing relatively well right now and aren't in the news as much. Another reason is that they've moved away from consumer electronics, where the competition is just too fierce.