Less Jobs
Data Than It Seems
(c)
copyright, View from Silicon Valley, 2008. All rights reserved.
Last week, the paper's
headline touts went a stat too far. They seemed to give out enough detail to allow us to draw some actual conclusions.
| Sector |
# Co.s |
Employees |
%Chg'06 |
$/Employee |
% vs.'06 |
| Biomedical |
11 |
13,691 |
1.20% |
$614,233 |
18.20% |
| Computers, perhips |
10 |
234,550 |
7.80% |
$647,650 |
6.80% |
| Elect Contract Svcs |
2 |
58,659 |
-49.20% |
$294,973 |
18.20% |
| Instruments, |
11 |
34,326 |
4.30% |
$428,544 |
1.70% |
| Internet Services |
7 |
53,740 |
25.10% |
$642,787 |
5.80% |
| Netwrk, telecom |
25 |
99,973 |
13.10% |
$499,370 |
4.70% |
| Non-technology |
12 |
65,779 |
9.60% |
$437,230 |
2.80% |
| Semi Mfr Equip |
10 |
32,451 |
3.90% |
$568,118 |
0.20% |
| Semiconductors |
35 |
177,923 |
-6.20% |
$411,658 |
16.00% |
| Software |
22 |
145,964 |
17.50% |
$306,947 |
-2.00% |
| Storage |
5 |
13,577 |
-28.00% |
$620,649 |
46.30% |
| Total |
150 |
930,633 |
-0.50% |
$484,042 |
11.10% |
Unfortunately, this
table of jobs by category was global data for global companies. It's nice to see and study, but not precisely relevant to
living and working here in Silicon Valley.
We did manage to extract a
few interesting details from a series of follow-on articles:
+Intel cut 7,800 jobs
(out of 86,300) worldwide.
>No big surprise here.
+Google added over
5,592 jobs in Mountain, representing over 50% of the growth in "Internet Services."
>5,592 net new local jobs represents 77%(!) of the reported 7,300 total Santa Clara County jobs
added in 2007!!
>As an aside, assuming a typical 10,000 share option package vested over four years, every Google employee in-place at
or before the IPO collects 2,500 shares time ~$450 for a gross of ~ $1,125K per year. (It was "only"
$922K before last week's 20% short squeeze.)
>This steady cash infusion amost certainly served to sustain local house price growth. After all, who cares about
"overpaying" by even a few-hundred thousand dollars when you "know" you're going to get another million next
year, and the year after, and...
>This
month marks four years since Google's April, 2004 IPO. To the extent Google's stock price declines further,
or even just flattens below it's ~$711 peak, Google-driven liquidity and its impact on local house prices should start to work in reverse.
>BTW, don't be surprised to see a near-term pop in house prices if Google folks rush to cash in last week's 20% pop.
The price increase will be short-term, and annoying, but it will tend to support our thesis.
+HP added 16,000 global
employees (now totalling 172,000).
>This is deceptive. If all the facts were released, we expect
they would show HP continues to cut US employees and "replace" them with workers in India and China.
Unfortunately, this
is about all the locally-relevant data we could glean from the paper's multi-page spread on employment. You need a different
slice of the data to get potentially-useful data.
Conveniently, we have
something which may be more useful --IPO performance. (Please see our upcoming missive: "Can You Really Make Money In
IPOs?").
