Dec 04,2000 Despite New-Economy Tools, Overcapacity May Loom By Greg Ip, Robert L. Simison and Jacob M. Schlesinger Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal Vehicle factories from Detroit to Newark, Del., sit idle as the industry struggles with bloated inventories. On Friday the Big Three auto makers reported their weakest sales so far this year. A broader survey of purchasing managers released the same day shows that U.S. manufacturers ranging from textile makers to paper mills slowed their pace in November for the fourth consecutive month. Leather pants and jackets, meanwhile, are piling up on shelves of Gap Inc. stores around the country. And scores of fledgling telecommunications companies, faced with insufficient sales to cover their costs, are suddenly scaling back ambitious plans for new networks. As the nation's record-long economic expansion slows after five years of go-go exuberance, company after company is finding it has more capacity than it needs. That raises a fundamental question: Did corporate America overdo it with its capital spending binge of the 1990s? If so, that would argue for some sober rethinking of the New Economy's vaunted invulnerability -- and bode ill for the nation's prosperity in coming months. During past booms, business executives tended to get carried away, building too many new stores and factories even as demand for their goods softened. That worsened the blow when the bust finally came and they were forced to shutter their unused capacity. This time around was supposed to be different. Newly prominent capital markets were supposed to do a much better job than once-dominant bankers did at pulling the plug on financing before companies got too far. New technologies, such as sophisticated software programs that track sales, inventory and supply lines, were supposed to give companies better, more timely information about their markets. That was going to let them fine-tune production to demand, and thus smooth out -- or even eliminate -- the old boom-bust cycles. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for one, has repeatedly espoused this theory. "Twentieth-century business decision-making had been hampered by pervasive uncertainty," he observed earlier this year. That ambiguity, he said, has been significantly reduced by "the remarkable surge in the availability of more timely information." And the economy does seem to be performing more smoothly along those lines. American industry as a whole isn't saddled with an unusual amount of unused capacity. Despite slowing demand, the Fed says that all manufacturers, mining companies and utilities combined are currently using about 82% of their total capacity, right in line with the average level of the past two decades. Capacity even remains tight in many important sectors of the economy. Airlines are flying with their planes near their fullest loads in more than two decades. Oil companies have been careful in expanding drilling and refining capacity, one factor keeping oil prices high lately. Yet, new pockets of overcapacity emerge each passing week, giving rise to concern that -- if consumer demand slows sharply -- excess inventories will become a nationwide problem. It sounds a bit hauntingly like Japan, where corporate titans confidently expanded through the 1980s, proclaiming a new era of higher growth. When financial and property markets collapsed and consumer demand plunged in the early 1990s, companies were stuck with far more capacity than needed, helping deepen an economic quagmire from which Tokyo has yet to emerge. "I don't think we're seeing an overcapacity problem," says Goldman, Sachs & Co. economist William Dudley. "But you don't know until the bust -- Japan looked OK until it didn't look OK," he adds. The sectors now struggling with excess capacity show that information about future demand may not be perfect after all. Last week, for example, Altera Corp., a San Jose, Calif., maker of customizable semiconductor chips, warned that its revenue in the current quarter is likely be flat, rather than growing in double-digits as originally forecast. Vadim Zlotnikov, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, says Altera's sales have slowed because many of its chip customers overordered in past periods in anticipation of new demand that didn't materialize, and are now stuck with excess inventories. Sometimes, the problem is simply that old-fashioned corporate decision-making hasn't caught up with new Information Age tools. "A lot of the industry looks at pricing, volume and incentive decisions in three totally different meetings" inside their companies, Van Bussman, corporate economist for DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group told an investor group recently. Indeed, better market information by itself can't always prevent excessive buildups, especially in the case of potentially profit-rich new technologies. There, the lure of outsized returns seem to justify the risk of overinvesting. "People are excited about various technologies, they put capital in place and keep doing so until the profits slip," says John Makin, economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. "Then, there's too much capacity." That's not entirely bad news. Oversupply means deep discounts for consumers, even by the low-price standards of recent years. Some Lexus dealers are advertising a $1,500 price cut on options for Lexus RX300 sport-utility vehicles -- a luxury line that just a few weeks ago was commanding premiums above its sticker price. Jeep dealers are going Lexus one better, offering some options, such as air-conditioning, power locks and windows or automatic transmission, free of charge. Ford is countering with 0.9% financing on leftover 2000 model Explorer, Expedition and Excursion SUVs, well below rates of as much as 7.9% for its latest models. But all this discounting can also pinch profits, forcing companies to lay off workers and slash capital expenditures in an attempt to scale down to an appropriate size. On Friday, Ford Motor Co. lowered its profit forecast. The same day, auto-parts maker Delphi Automotive Systems Corp. said it would temporarily lay off 1,700 workers, or 3% of its work force. Chrysler, the maker of Jeeps, is working on plans to cut its five-year capital spending by 20%, or $9 billion. That marks a departure from the late 1990s and the first half of this year, when American companies seemed to conclude that the economy would keep shifting into ever-higher gears. Since 1995, U.S. factories, mines, and utilities have increased capacity by 5% a year -- more than double the pace from 1980 through 1994, according to the Fed. Retailers have been even more enthusiastic, embarking on a specialty-store building spree. The new specialty stores -- outlets geared to a particular market segment, such as sportswear or lingerie -- will increase the industry's nationwide floor space by about 30% by next year, compared with 1998, according to a survey of 75 leading specialty merchants by Lazard Freres & Co. analyst Todd Slater. He says that buildup is coinciding with a slowdown in the growth of consumer spending. Since 1995, San Francisco-based Gap alone has more than doubled its overall number of Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic stores to 3,500. In the coming year, it plans to add as many as 630 more, an 18% increase. A big unanswered question: Will those stores increase the chain's business or cannibalize existing sales? In Livingston, N.J., an affluent bedroom community about 15 miles west of New York City, construction workers are busy outfitting an Old Navy story in the Livingston Mall -- a mere two miles south of an existing Old Navy in a Route 10 strip mall. Pat Martino often stops by the Route 10 Old Navy to shop for friends' children but says she will probably favor the more convenient Livingston Mall outlet when it opens. There's also an Old Navy a few miles from the Union, N.J., university where she works as a secretary. "I don't know how they all exist, there are so many of them," she says. But she welcomes their deep discounts: On a recent morning, she picked up five fleece jackets at about a third off their regular price of more than $20 each. "I think this will be one of the best Christmases on record for consumers," says Lazard's Mr. Slater. "But don't expect record results from retailers." Indeed, Gap's expansion has been so aggressive that the economy doesn't need to collapse for Gap to take a hit. Consumer spending just has to stop growing quite as swiftly as it has in recent years. Companywide, Gap's sales for the fiscal third quarter ended Oct. 28 were up 12% from a year earlier, but its sales per square foot of store space fell 16%. "We'll concede that we built too fast," says Gap spokesman Jack Dougherty. "But we disagree that we've built too many" stores, he adds. "We have less than 6% of market share, and we think there's a lot of opportunity out there." It isn't just giddiness that may have driven American companies to overinvest in recent years. The warp-speed world of global competition also means that any profitable new business quickly draws a flood of hungry new entrants. Consider the evolution of the market for sports utility vehicles, which is still highly profitable -- though decreasingly so. In 1995, North American factories were cranking out about 1.7 million SUVs. Production was divided among 30 different models. Since then, the nation's SUV-production capacity has doubled, and consumers now have 52 nameplates to choose from, according to Autodata Corp., a Woodcliff Lake, N.J., auto-industry research firm. Goldman Sachs estimates that over the next four to five years manufacturers are planning another 44% increase in SUV capacity, with 49 new models. To be sure, a good portion of that increase has been justified by Americans' voracious appetite for the mammoth vehicles. "This year SUV sales are up 10% in a market that's up 4%," says George Pipas, a sales analyst at Ford. And even with total vehicle sales expected to sink by 5% next year, he says he is "pretty confident" that "there are segments within SUVs that will grow at double-digit rates again." Still, only the most starry-eyed analysts expect demand to keep pace with the surge in supply. Goldman analysts see the percentage of SUV-production capacity actually being used plunging to 81% in 2005 from 92% today. The result, they say: profit margins will drop by half. Already, "it's gotten so competitive it's unbelievable," complains Houston Jeep dealer Alan Helfman. "I just lost two customers because they had already owned our product and wanted to try one of our competitors'," he adds. Last month, to work off unwanted inventories, Chrysler closed Jeep factories in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, for a week and plans to idle them for another week later this month. American auto makers -- having suffered their share of painful downturns -- say they have actually tried to exercise some restraint in recent years in building up capacity for SUVs and other vehicles. But Japanese and German manufacturers have been flooding the market pioneered by the Big Three. Over the past few years, Germany's Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and Mercedes-Benz AG have added their own North American SUV production. So have Nissan Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. Both those Japanese companies are planning expansions, while a third, Honda Motor Co., will soon join them. Toyota, for one, expects to sell 60,000 of its new Sequoias next year into a market it expects to grow by, at most, 40,000 units, says Alan DeCarr, Toyota's vice president for sales in the U.S. He says Toyota is banking on grabbing share from Ford's Expedition and GM's Tahoe and Yukon models. The auto industry has always had its sharp ups and downs, so perhaps it's no surprise that Detroit once again faces an overcapacity problem. The more jarring development is a glut in high-tech sectors of the economy, where demand was expected to keep up with whatever supply came onstream. Companies selling into new market segments have no historical markers to guide them in predicting sales patterns. Rapidly increasing demand and the potential for sky-high rates of return encourage technology firms to bet on the high side when building plants or laying cables. Financial markets can also get swept up in a herd mentality that exaggerates the unguarded enthusiasm of the industry pioneers. A 1996 telecommunications deregulation law -- combined with growing awareness of the remarkable new business frontiers to be opened by the blending of computers with phones -- unleashed one of the information industry's greatest gold rushes. Hundreds of new telecommunications companies were launched, intent on competing with the entrenched regional Bell operating companies by offering everything from consumer voice and long-distance services to high-speed Internet service for business. By paying premium prices for industry start-ups, executives at AT&T Corp. and WorldCom Inc. sent a clear early signal that they thought the potential for growth was huge. After that, nearly 40 so-called competitive local-exchange carriers were able to raise funds during the late 1990s in the heady market for initial public stock offerings, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. Many more raised money through bond offerings to the point where telecom start-ups currently carry $74 billion in debt, according to Lehman Brothers. So far, however, these newcomers have barely made inroads against the old local phone companies, which Merrill estimates still control 94% of the local business phone market. None of the upstarts has yet to report a profit. Industry enthusiasts say the problem isn't overcapacity or lack of demand, which is high, but some bottlenecks and glitches, such as insufficient capital to finance the networks. Skeptics, however, think investors are now correctly cutting off financing after concluding that most of the upstarts won't ever find enough demand to justify their spending. Saddled with unfinished or underused fiber-optic lines, these companies say they will slash capital spending by 23% next year from this year's $8 billion level, according to Paul Sagawa of Sanford Bernstein. Just four years ago, such spending totaled only $634 million. FirstWorld Communications Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo., began building and operating fiber-optic networks in the mid-1990s, including a major one for the city of Anaheim, Calif. In 1998, the company decided to expand from voice service to Internet access, Web integration consulting and hosting of Web sites for other companies. Enthusiastic investors helped FirstWorld finance these ambitions, as the company raised $600 million in stock and junk bonds. In March 2000, it went public at $17 a share. But many of those same investors also financed countless competitors. And all of those new companies found the market tough to crack. In the Los Angeles area, for example, FirstWorld was just one of 10 new telecom companies attempting, with limited success, to strip business away from the established players, Verizon Communications SBC Communications Inc., says Terry Smith. His firm, Call Control Systems, of San Clemente, Calif., advises businesses on phone and data service. "They're the new kids on the block, they don't have any track record," he explains. He says he has steered some clients who did business with the start-ups back to the local phone company because of service or maintenance problems. Just four months after going public, FirstWorld warned investors that sales would be below expectations and a month later said it was putting its telephone-service and Internet-access businesses up for sale. That could include selling its interest in the underused Anaheim fiber-optic loop. Only about six of the loop's 60 strands that FirstWorld operates currently carry traffic. FirstWorld's stock now trades at about $1 a share. FirstWorld is devoting its remaining physical assets -- mainly nine data centers -- to hosting Web sites for small and midsize businesses. "The opportunity there in our minds is endless -- this market is going to explode," says Scott Chase, FirstWorld's senior vice president of corporate and external affairs. But the company has a ways to go to fill the space it has already built. The portion of FirstWorld's Web-hosting capacity currently in use: 13%. _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
