Companies With Fake Values and a Fake Economic/Financial State (Phony Valuations)
Related: Remember That Microsoft Mass Layoffs Are Imminent Because Its 'Empire' is Falling Apart | NVIDIA Corp Lost 36% of Its "Value" Since Cheeto Inauguration, But "Gen Hey Hi" (GenAI) is Totally Not a Bubble
Today we hope to properly cover a seemingly complex issue albeit very concisely, or in as few words as necessary (images help). We actually covered this more verbosely in the past, usually in relation to one particular company each time, e.g. Apple and Microsoft.
There tends to be a habit (tendency), e.g. inside IBM, to assume only the workforce is being cheapened. We covered this literally dozens of times before and the reality is more complicated because IBM is running out of "major clients" and it has a lot of debt to pay back. The same is true for Microsoft and Apple (Google's debt is a lot smaller). But even Google is having issues, hence many deep cuts. Today we see the headline "Google plans new job cuts, Indian employees from Hyderabad and Bengaluru offices will be impacted" (similar to reports from last week). As a reminder, Microsoft fired even Indian workers working from India with Indian salaries. That's how poor Microsoft has become. Massive debt. From what we've read in recent days, even Indians now complain about IBM being cheap. At some point IBM cannot aim any lower; it won't find workers "cheap" enough to still do the job/s. Then customers will notice significant degradation and accordingly flee. That's already happening.
You simply cannot cheapen everything! There's a limit to how much a company can 'optimise' operations or cover up financial woes.
Meanwhile in South-Asian media there's this bizarre claim that South Korean companies are undervalued. They even use the word "discount". But that's nonsense. It's not a discount, it's just called not lying (or lying less). Why should we believe that companies with about a trillion dollars in debt (in 2025) are somehow "worth" tens of trillions of dollars? Based on what? Some "analysts" or financial 'gurus' they paid? They're building a pyramid scheme in the stock market. It'll all go up in smoke, eventually. Just because they try to improve their "credit" (for more debt and more patience from gullible shareholders) doesn't mean they can keep it up forever. See what happened to Intel. It didn't fake 'well enough' (or long enough). █
