Product obsolescence

Fixed assets (excluding land) used by a company usually decrease in value over time, even when properly maintained. This can be due to product obsolescence or simply wearing out (with an ultimate need to be replaced). If an asset life is less than a year, the expenditure on it is included in the profit/loss account as a cost. If, however, its life is greater than 1 year, then a way has to be found to adjust both profit/loss account and balance sheet to give recognition to the actual life of the asset. 

Perishability refers to physical deterioration or to product obsolescence caused by changing customer buying patterns or technological change. Perishable products are usually sold on a direct basis in order to move product through the supply chain more quickly and reduce the potential for inventory... 

As might be expected, improved spectrographie equipment is leading to an extension of x-ray emission as a technique for analysis, and this extension in turn points up opportunities for further improvement. One result is that we find ourselves in a period marked by rapidly changing equipment that soon becomes obsolescent. Description of all the equipment currently available is therefore futile. We shall accordingly restrict ourselves (with one exception see Section 9.9) to a representative list of products manufactured in the United States. 

Over a long time period it may well not be possible to duplicate library cell culture conditions. What happens when the lot of media used in the final culture step prior to pyrolysis has been consumed Can culture media suppliers assure nutritional identity between batches Media types for growth of fastidious strains invariably include natural products such as brewer s yeast, tryptic soy, serum, egg, chocolate, and/or sheep blood. Trace components in natural products cannot be controlled to assure an infinite, invariable supply. The microtiter plate wells used here do not hold much media. Even so, the day will come when all media supplies are consumed and a change in batch is unavoidable. When that happens, if there were no effective way to compensate spectra for the resulting distortions, it would be necessary to re-culture and re-analyze replicates for every strain in the reference library. Until recently the potential for obsolescence was a major disincentive for developing PyMS spectral libraries of bacteria. Why this is no longer an insurmountable problem is discussed in the next section. 

Electronic products become e-waste when they are deemed at the end of their useful life. Nonfunctioning or obsolescent TVs, computers, printers, photocopiers, cell phones, fax machines, home appliances, lighting equipment, games and such, when no longer wanted, come to constitute e-waste. These electronic products contain many materials requiring special end-of-life handling, most prominently lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, cadmium, and plastics capable of releasing dioxins and furans. 

The behaviour of the company will consist in applying price increases to products with a faster-growing and more inelastic demand (new products) and price cuts to products with a decreasing and more elastic demand owing to increasing competition or obsolescence. 

One of the earliest organic antioxidants, now obsolescent due to its severe staining properties, health problems, and to the production of more effective antioxidants. Phenyl-p-Naphthylamine... 

The fundamental question is should mercury cellrooms for the production of chlorine and caustic soda be phased out in the near future, or should the industry be allowed - on the basis of its existing voluntary commitment - to move away from this obsolescent technology as it reaches the end of its economic life over the next 20-25 years ... 

Economic life is the most likely period of successful operation before a need arises for subsequent investment in addition equipment as the result of product or process obsolescence or equipment due to wear and tear. 

Economic life The period of commercial use of a product or facihty. It may be hmited by obsolescence, physical hfe of equipment, or changing economic conditions. 

Sometimes, however, an environmental warning has an unexpected source, a fiction or nonfiction writer who, for reasons of his or her own, chooses to produce a work about a new threat to the environment. This was the situation when Vance Packard wrote his 1959 best-seller The Waste Makers. Packard s book took as its subject planned obsolescence, the policy adopted by many manufacturers to build the products they made to be out of date in a predictable period. 

There are many barriers to and challenges for instrumentation commercialization. It seems that most often, the parties involved are working at crosspurposes. The (often academic) inventor is never satisfied and always wants to continue to improve his or her invention. The instrument company only wants to build and sell the product. They would also like to have planned obsolescence to guarantee future sales. The salesperson has to sell what he has now, while convincing the customer that it will meet all his needs. The customer wants a product that is inexpensive and will last forever. 

The first two entries listed in the table, namely, Obsolescence of the big pharma business model and Slump in R D productivity, are of particular relevance to the fine-chemical industry and are dealt with in more detail in the following two sections. They impact the outsourcing policy and consequently the demand for new PFCs. 

Down to the spring of 1938 the Air Ministry had avoided placing orders for obsolescent aircraft merely to boost production figures. On 27 April 1938, however, the Cabinet, under parliamentary pressure to match German aircraft production, authorised the Air Ministry to accept as many aircraft as it could from the British aircraft industry, up to a maximum of 12,000 machines over the next two years. The Treasury readily sanctioned expendimre on plant required for the programme. As a result of these measures the gap between British and... 

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