Tech Companies Pull Out of CES 2022

Amazon (AMZN), Meta (FB), T-Mobile (TMUS), Twitter (TWTR) and Pinterest (PINS) confirmed that they no longer plan to attend CES in Las Vegas January 5-8, citing health concerns over the recent spike in Covid-19 cases.

"The health and safety of our employees is our top priority. Due to the quickly shifting situation and uncertainty around the Omicron variant, we will no longer have an on-site presence at CES," Amazon spokesperson Sarah Sobolewski said in a statement.

"Out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees, we won't be attending CES in-person due to the evolving public health concerns related to COVID-19," Kamran Mumtaz, a spokesperson for Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, said in a statement. "We will participate virtually as much as possible and continue to collaborate with the CTA around CES, which remains an important event for Meta, our clients and industry partners," Mumtaz added, referring to the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the annual event.

Even before companies started pulling out, CES was expected to be smaller-than-usual this year. Still there are no plans to eliminate in-person attendance altogether. Instead, CTA plans to implement safety measures including vaccine, mask, and testing requirements. There will also be virtual conferencing for companies and attendees who can't attend.

"CES will still take place Jan 5-8 in Las Vegas with strong safety measures in place," the conference's media team said. "Thousands of entrepreneurs, businesses, media and buyers are planning to come to Las Vegas. Top leaders from federal and state and foreign governments are attending. And, we have received several thousand new registrants since late last week."

The upcoming event is set to be the first time CES welcomes back in-person attendees to its annual show since 2020, which took place just weeks before the Covid-19 outbreak became a full-blown pandemic.

In addition to challenges for the industry, the lack of participants may be bad news for the city of Las Vegas. In a normal year, the economic benefits of the show amount to around $291 million.

Telecom giant T-Mobile, a CES sponsor, released a statement last week announcing that it would withdraw from attending the show in person and that its CEO Mike Sievert would no longer give a keynote speech, either in person or virtually. "T-Mobile's entire team looks forward to an in-person CES 2023, which we hope includes an on-stage keynote in front of a live audience" the company said.

Source: CNN

Popular posts from this blog

EOQ Calculations in Excel

Image
Last week in Operations Management we used Excel to calculate the Economic Order Quantity and graph Carrying Costs, Ordering Costs, and Total Costs. The Economic Order Quantity or "EOQ" is the order size that "minimizes" Total Costs. Any more or less and you are spending too much on ordering or too much on keeping inventory. For example, in the Excel spreadsheet below, if you had an Annual Demand of 12000 units, Ordering Costs of $10 per order, and Holding costs of $4 per unit per year, the EOQ would be 245 units and Total Costs would be $980.00: We used the following formula in Excel to calculate EOQ: =SQRT((2*B2*B3)/B4) And the following formula to calculate Total Costs at this point: =$B$6/2*$B$4+$B$2/B6*$B$3 To create the graph, we used the following formulas and simply copied them over a range of 100 to 500 units. Ordering Costs: =$B$2/D2*$B$3 Holding Costs: =D2/2*$B$4 Total Costs: =F2+G2 Looking at this chart, we can clearly see that our order size of 245 is ...
Read more

Reliability Calculations in Excel

Image
In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex...
Read more

“How Are We Doing?” Efficiency, Utilization, and Productivity

Image
In business, knowing how we are performing in relation to our competition is vital. Internally we want to know if we are using resources effectively and getting the most out of what we have. Efficiency and Productivity are two calculations that are fundamental to the success of any organization. While the calculations are simple, choosing what measures to use and collecting the necessary data requires a thorough understanding of your industry. To calculate Efficiency you will have to first decide what to use as a base for comparison. Does your company already have a “target” of some kind? Like total units produced? If so then you can compare everything to that. Once you have that, there are a couple of basic formulas that can be used: Efficiency = Actual Output/Effective Capacity X 100% Utilization = Actual Output/Design Capacity X 100% Design Capacity is the maximum output achieved under ideal conditions. Effective Capacity is always less than Design Capacity because of factors...
Read more