Deere seems to have bad relations with their employees, customers, and regulatory bodies.
The shareholders should remove the board of directors.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Just for that failure, they should all likely be gone.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
Yes their profit is up, no it is unrelated to the concerns
The company is acting in a way that luts the whole food system at risk
They should be disbanded, by force. I recommend replacement with a farmer cooperative
I somewhat agree with your earlier comment, but this bit is ignoring the systemic issues involved.
Deere is a leader in much of the efficiency technology that allows large-scale farming operations to reach the economy of scale needed to farm the huge multi-thousand (tens of thousands of acres in many cases) grain operations that are slowly but surely taking over food production in the US.
This trend, unabated, is a weird form of monopoly power for lack of a better word. If one manufacturer is more or less the sole-source for the largest corporate farms, and those farming operations are putting smaller ones out of business due to cost pressure - eventually - and likely sooner than later it becomes a too big to fail situation and a systemic national security risk.
This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing. If these trends continue for another decade or three, and then Deere has say a massive IT failure, planting and harvesting operations literally grind to a halt for the top-end equipment entirely reliant on the automation and data harvesting these machines require to operate. People will be at risk for starvation in the event of an extended outage. Farming as a Service has a hidden cost to it many are not seeing in these comments.
I don't agree with disbanding Deere and nationalizing it - however this really needs to be looked at much more than a simple competition issue. It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market, which is subsequently running the smaller operations out of business and putting the US food supply at a systemic risk if nothing is done.
Of course a competitor could somehow battle through the patent forest and capital requirements, but I wouldn't bet our lives on that.
This does seem like capitalism at work. Still, I really want to hate the players and the game. This has been brutal extractive malevolence against an industry supporting the very base of the pyramid of needs: John Deere is hurting the world incredibly badly.
And the Deer example is sorta nice in that I don't have to explain to management why that sorta DRM is a horrible idea. They already know.
Deere controls around 40% of the North American agricultural machinery market [1]. This is so far from anything near any kind of monopoly it's ludicrous to call it so. No court has ever ruled anything anywhere near this low as any kind of monopoly. Everything you wrote predicated on this FUD is invalid.
> This is starting to get into the realm of arms manufacturing.
And this takes the hyperbole into crazy land.
> It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market
Nope. The competition for making such machines is rapidly increasing as it's becoming easier, not harder to make ag equipment. Pressure from a huge host of countries whose economies are becoming first world is adding many other worthy candidates. CNH, Agco, Kubota, Case, New Holland, and many others are already making inroads. EU is the biggest ag market, and Deere has far less market share there than here, where the competitors have already made major inroads, and they're now moving imports and even production into the US.
> It's rapidly becoming a winner-takes-all market
Do you look at market data from investment firms or even at SEC filings from the major players? These statements are not based in any fact.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/plowing-ahead:-john-deeres-c...
If the goal is some vague "easy to repair" mantra, then tons of things in an advanced economy are going to be hard to repair since technology gets more and more complex. Limiting future inventions to also include "easy to repair," under some complex definition, will limit some innovation. Car engines were once easy to repair, then we added all sorts of emissions control, making them harder, and then as computerized control systems turned out to provide massive benefits (lower gas use, more engine life, better control of timine, fuel injection, and ahost of other things), it again got harder to repair. And engines are simple. Should your internet browser or smart phone allow any neanderthal to consider it easy to repair? Or does an increasingly advanced and complex technological environment reasonably make things harder to repair, even while providing advances that are providing benefits to consumers?
The role of govt is to make an environment where companies compete, and given that JD owns < 40% of the North American Ag Machinery market, it seems there are ample other choices.
Economically, and historically, legislation effectively putting price floors or ceilings on goods (in this case price not as $, but as tech requirements and cutting into company ability to sell goods) pretty much every time comes back to bite consumers. This is econ 101.