“Cost Down” (v)
Is that expression used in any English speaking country? Is it a local expression that has been directly translated from Chinese? Other?
I’ve never heard this expression outside of Taiwan. I’ve heard “cut costs” or “reduce costs” but never “cost down”.
Sounds like the kind of shite dreamed up by the same kind of sad fucks who make their livings preparing interminable Powerpoint presentations. It means reduce or cut costs, and those are the terms that should be used. Stamp on cost down like the evil slimy dweebspeak it is!
Here is one example of how cost down can be used:
The cost of IBM shares is down today.
Thanks guys, but I know what it means and I know how it’s used. What I’m trying to learn is whether or not it is used in any English speaking country or if it’s a local expression.
So often, when training business students, they will say something like “Our company needs to cost down, so we are laying people off.”
In those instances, I want to mention that although a native speaker will understand the meaning, it will come across as Chinglish, something that many business students are trying to avoid. However if it’s an expression that is being used in some English speaking country, then I just need to get myself up to date.
[quote=“steelersman”]Here is one example of how cost down can be used:
The cost of IBM shares is down today.[/quote]
Wouldn’t that be “The price of IBM shares…”? I’ve never heard of shares having a “cost”.
Anyway, the OP isn’t asking about the words, he means the unit of sound that you can’t scrape your bien tang chopsticks without hearing a hundred fucking times these days.
It’s Taipei corporate non-language, currently used indiscriminantly as a rough substitute for something like
“due to the recent economic downturn and commensurate decline in revenue”
although, it can be equally applicable as
“these are measures that we will be taking due to the recent economic downturn and commensurate decline in revenue”
and, further, as
“the recent economic downturn and commensurate decline in revenue” itself.
It’s something they can pronounce (roughly), you don’t really need to speak English to use it, hence its frequent occurrence buried in a stream of Manadarin or Taiwanese.
And, as seen, it can be applied with a complete disregard for the part of speech required.
Finally, it can stand alone as the answer to a question needing no particular thought or consideration.
Like to make me puke everytime I hear it.
Which is plenty.
What Sandman said. It’s new business slang. I do believe it’s from the West, not Chinglish – I think it’s an extension from "cost-down approach, cost-down project, etc.), which are already bad English (they should of course be “cost-cutting”, “cost-reduction”, etc.), but that’s what you get when business schools have low entrance requirements for English scores. It’s bad enough to use it as a compound adjective, but further extension to a verb form is truly asinine, and should be stamped out mercilessly. Beat anyone who uses it to within an inch of their miserable life. 
“Cut costs” is the verb + object they should use. “Cost reduction” is the noun. I tell my corporate students that there’s a lot of horrifyingly bad English even among native speakers, and that they should strive to copy good usage, not just any old native usage. They don’t always realize there’s a difference, until you draw some local comparisons to bad native Mandarin (or Taiwanese) and proper usage.
It’s part of the business mantra “Quality Up, Cost Down.” I guess the quality part is meaningless in this part of the world, so you’re left with just “Cost Down.”
Yes, so I tell my students that the mantra is an abbreviation of “Let’s get quality up, and cost down”. I point out that the mantra contains only noun prep. noun prep, and that you can’t just take those and use them willy nilly. I then threaten them with a very large dictionary suspended above their heads.
I used to have to deal with corporate IT sales people in Australia and am pretty sure I heard them say stuff like that.
I’ve heard lots of sales and staffs make this mistake.
I think this execrable term may come from Japanese business “English”. It refers to Japanese cost management or cost reduction programs:
[quote]From early on, the Japanese recognized that the most efficient way to keep costs down (many firms call their cost reduction programs cost down programs) was to design them out of their products, not to reduce them after the products entered production. This realization reflects a fundamental reality of cost management: the majority of a product’s costs (as much as 90 to 95 per cent according to some experts) are “designed in.” Consequently, effective cost control programs must focus on the design, in addition to the manufacturing, phase of a product’s life cycle. Matching where the savings can be achieved, the bulk of Japanese cost management systems are designed to reduce costs during the product development process not during manufacturing.
By adopting such a forward looking approach, where costs are designed out of products before they enter production, the focus of Japanese cost management systems shifted from feedback-oriented techniques, such as product costing and operational control, to feedforward-oriented techniques such as target costing and value engineering. This difference in orientation is critical. Japanese cost management programs are an integration of six distinct cost management techniques; target costing, value engineering, inter-organizational cost management systems, product costing, operational control, and kaizen.
Together, these six techniques give Japanese firms the ability to manage costs in three distinct ways. First, by controlling the mix of products that are manufactured and sold (this decision is supported by the target costing and product costing systems). Second, by reducing the costs of future products (this objective is supported by the target costing, value engineering, and inter-organizational cost management systems). And finally by reducing the costs of the existing products (this objective is supported by the product costing, operational control, and kaizen systems).[/quote]
here’s
[quote]Lesson #3 is the “price down/cost down” mentality of Japanese corporations. This means that Japanese managers understand that prices are more likely to fall than increase over time, therefore to continue to earn an acceptable Return on Investment (ROI) costs must also decrease over time. U.S. businesses continue to rely on the cost plus pricing method and therefore don’t consider the long-term costs of production in their pricing strategy.
Lesson #4 is the proactive role of cost management in Japanese corporations. In connection with the price down/cost down mentality discussed in Lesson #3, Japanese businesses manage costs during the product planning stage rather than later in the product life cycle. Accountants play a key role in this process in Japanese businesses; in contrast accountants in U.S. corporations are often the last group involved in the product development process and often report actual results of operation. [/quote]
I very much doubt that most managers in Taiwan understand this background, but I’m sure that some in the IT manufacturing business do.
lots of sales people and staff members? 
Yes, thanks you. It is what is I mean.
“Cost Down” is a fairly commonly used phrase in the financial arena, heard it used numerous times before I came to this rock.
I heard a new one last week - “De-grow” - is such a thing possible?
Used as a verb?
My background is in not in finance but in sales and marketing, and I’ve been here 4 years (yesterday). Before coming to Taiwan, I’d never heard “cost down” used as a verb like “We need to cost down.” I’ve been correcting students saying the more common way to say it, in my experience, would be “We need to cut costs.” or “We need to reduce costs.”
Sounds like there is some disagreement here?
Ugh. I didn’t even like Clinton’s “we need to grow the economy”. You grown corn.
Now we have sales negatively growing (no, you imbecile, it’s sales are shrinking), and de-growth. Idiots!
I’m hoping for some negative shrinkage in my income this year. 
Not necessarily. It might just be used by people with weak English and a love for geeky bizspeak, or those who work and hang out with that kind of person so much that they adopt their speech patterns. BTW, I have also heard “headcount down” and “size down”. Actually, there is nothing essentially ungrammatical about these. Think of “scale down” or “calm down”. It’s just that they are dweeby sounding to the more literary kinds of folk, don’t you know?
Never heard of the “cost down approach”??
No, these are different. You can scale something up or down, or calm someone down. These verbs are transitive, and have established verb + obj + up or down patterns. Cost and headcount are not fundamentally transitive verbs (even though bizspeak now has ‘to cost something’, you don’t ‘cost something up’), and ‘to size something up’ has a different, established usage. Not good analogies, sorry.
Heard of, yes. But I’ve heard of “ain’t” and “looser” (for loser) too. Examples of bad usage don’t justify themselves. ‘A cost-reduction approach’ is far better.