Pent-up demand allows companies to get away with even large price rises.Consumer prices may have risen even faster in May than in April, according to forecasts.As a result, returns, which held up in the first quarter, are expected to do so again in the second, says Jonathan Golub of Credit Suisse, a bank.Big firms’ net margins have actually been rising.This suggests that as yet, far from forcing companies to absorb the extra costs, inflation may have given them some extra pricing power.Plenty of businesses are, however, preparing for a time when they can ratchet prices up no longer.Sridhar Tayur of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, who consults with three large companies, says that each of them is redesigning products to eliminate waste and streamline manufacturing.Mr Adamczyk said in January that he had established an internal Honeywell task-force to respond to inflation (though he was vague about what exactly it might do).Lineage, a logistics firm with 200 cold-storage warehouses across America, says it has created several such teams.One focuses on avoiding supply bottlenecks in critical construction projects, another on recruiting workers in a tight market.Rising labour costs are chief executives’ biggest headache by a long way.Some companies are trying to keep a lid on future wage increases by using one-off inducements, such as signing bonuses, to attract new recruits.
压抑许久的消费者需求使得公司即使大幅涨价也能够逃脱惩罚。据预测，5月份居民消费价格涨幅可能比4月份还要快。因此，瑞士信贷银行的乔纳森・戈卢布表示，第一季度维持良好的回报率预计将在第二季度再次上涨。大公司的净利润率实际上一直在上升。这表明，到目前为止，通胀非但没有迫使企业耗费额外成本，反而可能给了它们一些额外的定价权。然而，许多企业正在为无法再提高价格的时刻的到来做准备。卡内基梅隆大学泰珀商学院的斯里达尔・塔尤尔在为三家大公司提供咨询服务后表示，每家公司都在重新设计产品以消除浪费并简化生产。阿达姆奇克先生在一月份表示，他已经建立了一个霍尼韦尔内部特别工作组来应对通货膨胀（尽管他对特别工作组的具体工作内容含糊不清）。在美国拥有200个冷藏仓库的物流公司Lineage表示，他们已经创建了几个这样的团队。一个团队着重避免关键建筑项目的供应瓶颈，另一个侧重于在紧张的市场中招聘工人。劳动力成本上升会是首席执行官们最头疼的长远难题。一些公司试图通过签订奖金等一次性奖励来吸引新员工，并以此控制未来的工资增长。
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