The 7 most wasteful companies in America can afford to spend a lot of time and resources into strategies that don’t play out very well. While doing this and possibly unintentionally fighting for a place among the 16 most hated companies in America, they also waste a lot of man hours and energy that could be put into something else like, say, a new, innovative product that could change the industry forever. There comes a point in every company’s life where there is enough money stashed in back-up funds and rescue strategies, where a company already makes a lot more than they spend and they just get greedy and decide to expand further and further. While doing this, many companies (even some on this list) also try to undertake new, risky endeavors with different products or aggressive market expansion which sometimes really does not work out for them. A lot of products or marketing strategies start out as a splendid idea and end in a disastrous, unfinished, poorly executed ink blot on the reputation of the company.
As you may have noticed, you will not be reading about wasting in the general meaning but instead, a more fundamental one. A company can waste its employees’ time and efforts, its funds and the resources it takes to build a new product or start a new service. However, if you go down the chain of related resource wasting, a single company failure could so much as cause a loss of effort and materials on a much, much deeper level than it seems. While with smaller businesses failure is way more likely and so is the wasting of resources, the companies on this list are countless orders of magnitude bigger, which means that their failures are not only more wasteful but can also be catastrophic for other, innocent businesses. It isn’t quite disastrous to design your product in your garage and have a hundred pieces made and flop on the market. On the other hand, producing a product that is going to fail in the millions can take out a larger bite not only out of the company’s funds but also the planet’s resources. Without further ado, let’s take a look a seven examples of what not to do.
7. Electronic Arts (EA)
EA and its subdivisions are known for the drastic change in tactics and marketing that has been the topic of a lot of debate and controversy over the past couple of years. Although lots of these new directions aimed to bring in more profits, many ended up bringing the company bad reputation and wasting resources.
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6. Dow Chemical
Dow Chemical is another company which has taken some drastic measures while trying to expand its markets. Things did not go so well for Dow and its attempt at expansion in different business sectors ultimately resulted in a drop in profits and a waste of company resources.
5. Amazon.com
Amazon.com (yes, the company name includes “.com”) took a new direction with their somewhat successful kindle devices but also an array of other handhelds, including a disastrous smartphone endeavor. With the Kindle line’s perspectives of becoming less and less profitable, Amazon.com’s most recent endeavors meant more of a waste than profit.
4. Forest Laboratories
Forest Laboratories is a pharmaceutical company which was under fire not too long ago due to its CEO’s poor management strategy. Forest Labs makes the fourth place in the list of the 7 most wasteful companies with its loss of profits due to its ineffective Alzheimer’s disease treatment product and the loss of an exclusive patent and all the resources put into these two.
3. Applied Material
Applied Material is a worldwide leader in providing tools for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. While this is a high demand, dynamic industry today, the company’s resources went to waste after a series of investments and acquisitions which did not play out very well at all.
2. Hewlett-Packard
Making the second place, this electronics giant has been making news with a number of unsuccessful acquisitions too. Unsuccessful might be an understatement, though, because these poor decisions, combined with the company’s lack of efforts to expand in the now demanding markets, makes it the second most wasteful in the world.
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1. Advanced Micro Devices
Look at your computer. It probably has one or two parts made by the first contender in the list of the 7 most wasteful companies in America. Advanced Micro Devices, known widely as AMD has been wasting resources on poor business decisions, including the lack of expansion into the booming smart devices market.
