Ivan Glasenberg Quotes

He testified that when you looked at it through the eyes of 'let's do it', the costs were very small. They were less than they'd had to spend to host a convention of transportation executives. The cost was not that great.

Levi's can produce many more Western jeans than we can and make them at a better price.

With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.

When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.

It isn't as important to buy as cheap as possible as it is to buy at the right time.

It's a terribly hard job to spend a billion dollars and get your money's worth.

They realize that spending millions to save billions is just good business.

I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue.

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money.

When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We're not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.

Even during negotiation with HAL, Dassault felt that the cost with which the HAL will produce will be far higher than the aircraft produced in France. That was the reality.

We take dispassionate view of our investments. Does it mean that we are looking out to monetise the investment? That is not correct. But if we get an offer that we cannot refuse, as I say, then it is not that we are not, that we will still hold on to the investment.

You don't try to have the very lowest cost of an asset. You try to have the right asset. So rather than thinking about the lowest cost, the question is how do you get the best productivity.

Valuations are always much-debated. I try to center on what is the value to us. Is it solving a problems for us? If it is, we find a way to proceed. If the valuation has been overhyped on something and it doesn't make sense, we won't. It's very simple for me. I tend not to worry too much about the valuation. It's really what the value is to us.

If I were to spend investor money on nice furnishings and so forth, particularly early on, I might not have it for opportunities that can really grow our business.

If an acquisition can speed a process or fill a gap, we'll jump right to that. It's about timing, need... it's not necessarily an algorithm.

Obviously, consideration of costs is key, including opportunity costs. Of course capital isn't free. It's easy to figure out your cost of borrowing, but theorists went bonkers on the cost of equity capital. They say that if you're generating a 100% return on capital, then you shouldn't invest in something that generates an 80% return on capital. It's crazy.

When you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work.

A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.

One of my rules for investing is, I don't invest in a deal where I don't think I have an unfair advantage and where I don't think I can personally impact the outcome.

I said the only way I would join Pets.com was if I could get Amazon to invest, and I did. I knew that anything that could be sourced externally, Amazon could do better and cheaper than anyone else except Walmart. It was really obvious to me.

Creativity should be balanced with commercial interests.

I love the Knicks and Rangers, right, but you still have a responsibility to your shareholders. They're not there because they're fans. You don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a stock because you're a fan. You do it because you think that the business is going to increase in value, that the stock price is going to go up.