...ALTO CHEMICALS EUROPE PROBLEM STATEMENT How will Graaff implement the revised strategy across all the subsidiaries which will be beneficial for the company in long run? COMPANY BACKGROUND: • ACE was the regional headquarter of Alto Chemical Corporation. • There were nine wholly owned subsidiaries which produced and sell finished and building block chemicals across Western Europe. • ACE accounted for 1/3rd of alto’s global production and sales Companies had matrix structure. • Company choice for stabilizers was TIN because they have ample raw materials sand feedstock. • Company has competitive advantage as they have started a new plant for feed stock of TIN whereas other procured from third party CASE ANALYSIS: After taking over as the headquarters’ marketing manager, Graaff has devised a new strategy for ACE’s stabilizer business. Earlier the focus of the company was to capture the market share. The company was volume-oriented and competed on price. There are two kinds of stabilizers Tin and Barium, the company’s choice was Tin as it had ample stock of the needed raw material. The switching cost between two variants was high The company focused on trying to convert Barium customers to Tin by offering them a discount of 2-3% below Barium prices and better product performance. The company offered technical service which was important for small and medium sized client. With this strategy they were able to cover 18% market share. Issue with the current strategy are:- ...
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...Case Brief Internal Entrepreneurship at Dow Chemical Description With the 2001 merger with Union Carbide, Dow Chemical Company became the largest chemicals and Plastics Company in the world. The merged company had sales of $27.8 billion specializing in chemical, plastic and agricultural products. Prior to the merger, growth had become a priority for Dow Chemical. In the years prior to 2000, the firm’s turnover dropped from $20 billion to $18.4 billion as the Net profit margin eroded to 7.1% from 10.3%. The e-epoxy.com venture was one of the many new growth initiatives Dow Chemical launched to bolster growth during this period. E-epoxy.com was conceived by Ian Telford to target the underserved market of small customers that are cost conscious. Evaluation EP&I Division: The epoxy business is a high margin but also highly capital-intensive business for Dow chemical. With 20% of the customers generating 80% of the division’s revenue and the cyclical nature of the epoxy market, the business is very susceptible to downturns. The concentration of revenues from a few customers would intuitively put customers in a position of strength during price negotiations; however Dow Chemical did not disclose prices charged to other customers. Dow Chemical maintained relationships with key clients by providing value added services (integrated supply chain, technical assistance, and volume rebates). The added services were necessary to differentiate Dow’s product. With highly...
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...Leading Org. Culture & Change Case 4: Alto Chemicals Europe (AR) 1. At the time of Graaff’s appointment, how good a job do you think the sales force was doing? The ACE’s headquarters organization was by product group and the subsidiaries was by function. The interaction could be best described as a matrix relationship. In that case there was a dual sources of influence on product and subsidiary management. Stabilizers had experienced an annual growth rate averaging less than 3% during the 1980s. They were considered as a matured industry as all potential applications have already been discovered and no rapid growth was expected. To enter the market, the company tried to convert customers from Barium to Tin (the company’s variety of stabilizer) with initial discounts of 2 – 3% below Barium prices and a better product performance. The entry strategy placed its sales attention on the segments for which price played a relatively significant role. Producers to whom the cost ratio of stabilizers was high. ACE was not the sole supplier of Tin in the market, but for the others it accounted for a minor share of their stabilizer sales. Tin stabilizers were sold through a specialized sales force in all the subsidiaries. They were compensated primarily on a fixed salary and they were able to manage their sales quota through few large clients by offering them discounts. There was Conflict among subsidiaries. Selling was too price oriented which led to the underutilization of sales...
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...Professor Stinson Mgt 525: Arauco Case Study (This case analysis was completed by Lily and Roger) 1. Background Arauco was formed through a merger between Industrias Arauco and Celulosa Constitución in 1979. After that, the company began its expansion like purchasing land and plantations and installing new technology, purchasing the company Alto Paraná in Argentina in 1996, purchasing its third mill in Chile in 2000, and building new plant which called Valdivia mill in late 2001 and the plant had opened in January 2004. With these expansions, Arauco had become one of the world’s premier forestry enterprises in terms of plantation areas and yields by 2004. The company had three main product segments which include pulp products like bleached and unbleached Kraft pulp; forestry products like pulpwood; and wood products like lumber and remanufactured wood products. In 2004, the company wanted to invest more to get more development. The company was facing alternatives: one was forward integration moving into paper manufacturing; the other one was horizontal expansion investing US $1 billion to construct a new state-of-the-art chemical pulp plant. 2. Situation According to the case, we can see that the competition in the pulp industry is strong. First, the competition of existing competitors in market pulp was strong. From the case we can get that most of the large companies were involved in backward integration to produce the pulp for their paper themselves. Most...
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...Arauco Case 1. Should Arauco build the Nueva Aldea project? (Hint: Estimate the project Net Present Value and provide a recommendation considering quantitative and qualitative arguments) Qualitative arguments We would suggest the company to go ahead with the the project Nueva Aldea considering next arguments: Horizontal expansion The company Arauco should build the project Nueva Aldea, for various reasons related to production, efficiency, access to lower costs and its growth internationally. Among the reasons that support the construction of the new plant, we consider that Arauco will be located in a specific region (VIII) close to the ports of Lirquén, Coronel and San Vicente where we can find the largest productive plantations and where this strategic position would favors the mobilization of processed materials, key point of analysis to promote the expansion and interconnection of a company of this magnitude. Also have a perfect access to the central power grid, which would significantly reduce the cost of electricity transmission. In addition to the strategic location also would exist benefits regarding transdisciplinary work between different plants. Benefits that result in a consistent process integration, cross information, facilitating learning, technological exchange and decreased bureaucracies, all factors which contribute to the improvement of production processes and efficiency. In relation to economies of scope, this new project would achieve...
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...Vol. 14 Nº 27 Ben Tran: Green Management: The reality of Being Green in Business 21 GREEN MANAGEMENT: THE REALITY OF BEING GREEN IN BUSINESS GESTIÓN VERDE: LA REALIDAD DE LA SOSTENIBILIDAD ECOLÓGICA EN LA GESTIÓN GERENCIAL Ben Tran1 ABSTRACT Green management and going green are not as clear cut and easy as hyped by the general media. While going ecologically green is indeed beneficial and appropriate, the process and procedure of becoming green is anything but easy. Firstly, turning green is largely not a legal requirement, but a voluntary process. Thus, even though LEED (which is by far the more publicly known green certification standard) governs the certification of the green management effort, it is not a compulsory condition for practitioners to go green. Secondly, even with the encouragement of incentives to comply, practitioners are skeptical in becoming green due to: (a) a lack of true understanding of the benefit of ecologically friendly procedures (the practice of profits versus the theory of benefits); (b) lack of short term gain in life cycle costing (practitioners want instant incentives); and (c) mostly, because it is not a legal requirement for the vast majority of municipalities. Keywords: Green management, green business practices, barriers toward green management, encouragement & incentives for green management, LEED Certification. RESUMEN La gestión ambiental sostenible y el tornarse ecológico no es tan claro ni factible como lo pregona la prensa. Mientras...
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...Los Altos High School has tried various tactics to reduce stress in students. One thing they have not tried, however, is to feed the students chocolate. Although critics argue that chocolate is too high in sugar and fat content to actually be healthy in the amounts that we eat it, and any perceived changes in mood or stress level are fleeting, the notion that chocolate has positive effects on physical and mental health might not be too good to be true. Shara Aaron makes the case for the physical and mental health benefits of chocolate in the book Chocolate; A Healthy Passion. To begin with, chocolate has a long history dating back to the Aztecs who used it for its medicinal properties. They served it as a drink to the royalty, in ceremonies, as sacrifices to the gods, and as currency. From central america, chocolate spread to europe and the rest of the world. Since at the time, chocolate was extremely bitter and did not taste very good, it spread because of observed medical benefits. Centuries later in the 1990s,...
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...LENS CRAFTER Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, photographed at Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, California. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation. It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and C.E.O. had made him: to buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion—$300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal, on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering. The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters, and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched...
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...planning for the future. Some celebration had definitely been in order. The company, DataClear, was really taking off, fueled by the success of its first software product, ClearCloud. In 1999, itsfirstfull year of operation, DataClear's sales reached $2.2 million. Now, the following September, it was looking like 2000 sales could easily reach $5.3 million. At the all-staff meeting on the Friday before the off-site, Greg had announced the company's success in recruiting two more great 37 JUNE 2001 HBR CASE STUDY • Go Global-or No? executives, bringing the staff to 38.Tm more confident than ever that we'll hit our goals: $20 million in 2001 and then $60 million in 2002!" Clouds on the Horizon A New Jersey native, Greg held an MSc from Rutgers and then went West to get his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. He spent the next 15 years at Borland and Oracle, first as a software developer and then as a senior product manager. He started DataClear in Palo Alto, California, in the...
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...planning for the future. Some celebration had definitely been in order. The company, DataClear, was really taking off, fueled by the success of its first software product, ClearCloud. In 1999, itsfirstfull year of operation, DataClear's sales reached $2.2 million. Now, the following September, it was looking like 2000 sales could easily reach $5.3 million. At the all-staff meeting on the Friday before the off-site, Greg had announced the company's success in recruiting two more great 37 JUNE 2001 HBR CASE STUDY • Go Global-or No? executives, bringing the staff to 38.Tm more confident than ever that we'll hit our goals: $20 million in 2001 and then $60 million in 2002!" Clouds on the Horizon A New Jersey native, Greg held an MSc from Rutgers and then went West to get his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. He spent the next 15 years at Borland and Oracle, first as a software developer and then as a senior product manager. He started DataClear in Palo Alto, California, in the...
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...Mercedes Valdivia Professor Eliza Warren WRTG 391 14 July 2013 Advantages and disadvantages between Organic and conventional food: An annotated bibliography In the last decade the consumption of organic products has been growing steadily, although many consumer buy these products with the idea that they are buying organic because is healthy, but studies show that there is not much difference between nutrients and vitamins between organic food and conventional food. The area were organic has advantage over conventional is over the protection of the environment because organic is grown without the use of fertilizers or pesticides. Many studies and researches had been done in organic growing with most of them with the same result. This annotated bibliography shows some of the studies conducted throughout the world Aschemann-Witzel, J., Maroscheck, N., Hamm, U. (2013). Are organic consumers preferring or avoiding foods with nutrition and health claims? Pg. 68-76. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/6/1699.full.pdf+html A realistically designed purchase simulation was conducted using 210 German organic consumers, the study was done to determine whether organic products are purchased for its health benefits, the study used 3 different types of food, each types had five different brands. Apparently a consumer tends to believe that if a product is organic, it must be better. The sample tested was not enough to make a generalization of the German...
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...tagline “Innovating the HP Way”. Seven months later, on November 1, 1999, Agilent began operating as a separate stand-alone company. On November 18, 1999, Agilent launched its initial public offering, which at $2.1 billion, was Silicon Valley‟s largest IPO to date. From a small garage in Palo Alto, California, to employees around the world serving customers in 120 countries, Agilent has a long history of innovation and leadership in the communications, electronics, semiconductor, test and measurement, life sciences and chemical analysis industries. BIRTH OF AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES Agilent's foundation was laid by two entrepreneurs Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the form of Hewlett-Packard, a company started by them to provide test and measurement equipment. HP provides products, technologies, software solutions and services to consumers, small and medium sized businesses and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors. Agilent Technologies was born as a spin-off of Hewlett-Packard Company. It announced a plan to create a separate company, made up of HP‟s businesses in Test and Measurement, Semiconductor Products, Healthcare Solutions, Chemical Analysis and the related portions of HP Laboratories. REASONS FOR SPIN-OFF In March 1999, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it...
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...All living beings possess a built-in, biological alarm clock. This clock is responsible for innumerable bodily functions that are performed during various stages of a day/week/month/year. Examples include bowel movement, digestion, hormone production, menstrual cycle and migration (among birds/animals), to name a few. All these functions follow a particular cyclical pattern. When this process recurs annually, it is known as a circannual rhythm. Similarly, when this process recurs on a daily basis, it is known as a circadian rhythm. The word circadian comes from the Latin words ‘circa diem’, meaning about a day. Circadian rhythms are controlled by a biological clock within our brain. This section of brain is called the 'suprachiasmatic nucleus' (SCN). Signals produced by the SCN travel to different sections of the brain, thus stimulating various functions, such as body temperature, hormone secretion, changes in blood pressure, etc. There are numerous external factors as well, that regulate a circadian rhythm among human beings. These external factors are called zeitgebers (Hawkins & Orlady, 1993). Most common zeitgebers are light and temperature. Others include meal times, various social and physical activities. The most common circadian rhythm known to mankind is the sleep cycle. Sleep is an extremely important physiological phenomenon, during which our body heals and recuperates. Let us begin with understanding what sleep is, and what are the various sleep patterns. Sleep...
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...AP Psychology, Mr. Kujawa Analysis Writing--Stanford Prison Experiment 13 minutes--www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0 29 minutes--www.youtube.com/watch?v=760lwYmpXbchttp 01. Consider the psychological consequences of stripping, delousing, and shaving the heads of prisoners or members of the military. What transformations take place when people go through this experience? 02. What are the effects of living in an environment with no clocks, no view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation? 03. Compare the reactions of the visitors to the reactions of civilians in encounters with the police or other authorities. 04. What factors would lead prisoners to attribute guard brutality to the their disposition or character, rather than to the situation? 05. How and why did #8612, #819, and #416 break down emotionally? Do you think young adults from an urban class environment would have reacted in similar fashion as middle-class prisoners? Why or why not? Do you think women would have broken down emotionally in the same way as the middle-class prisoners? Why or why not? 06. What prevented “good” from objecting to the orders from the “bad” guards? 07. What were the dangers of the principal investigator assuming the role of prison superintendent? the former convict as head of the Parole Board? 08. Explain why it was and why it was not ethical to conduct this study. Was it worth to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research? 09. In...
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...You chose to study in the United Kingdom. You are beginning to think about what your options are after graduation. Building on an excellent international education you are returning to your home country, Brazil. You stand at the beginning of an exciting career, but what are the steps you need to take in order to find a suitable job, and where do you find the information you need? This careers profile provides you with practical advice about returning to work in Brazil to help you make a successful start in your career in the Brazilian labour market. Included are key facts about current trends and jobs in Brazilian industry, advice about seeking employment in Brazil, hints and tips for making a successful application, and helpful information sources. Country profile Benefits Main routes to employment Where will your career take you? Current career prospects Where to find more information Appendix 1: sample CV Country profile In the past two decades Brazil’s economy has seen a growth spurt, with an average growth of GDP of 4.5% between 2004 and 2007. Before the credit crunch which affected the global economy in 2008 – 2009, an estimated average GDP growth for 2008 to 2010 had been predicted at 5%. For 2010, the finance minister of Brazil has predicted the GDP growth to be 5.2%. This shows that the Brazilian economy is still one of the fastest growing economies of the world, together with the other BRIC countries: (Russia, India and China), of which India...
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