...Diversification Strategies Lucille Griffin Dr. Marcus Crawford BUS 508-Contemporary Business April 26, 2012 Diversification Strategies Compare and Contrast the two Businesses--Core Business, Their Size, Financials, Global Presence, use of E-Business (Marketing, Sales, etc.) The two businesses I chose to research are Amazon, the more successful business in diversification, and the Campbell Soup Company, the less successful business in diversification. Amazon was launched in July 1996, by Jeff Bezos, and is one of the most frequently visited shopping sites on the Internet with over 12 million customers in 160 countries, employing 1,600 staff. Amazon.com is was one of the first companies to make the Internet safe for shopping by encrypting credit card numbers and storing them on separate systems. The original plan was to give customers access to an enormous selection of books many more than any single bricks-and-mortar bookstore could hold while, being free of the considerable time and expense required to build stores and warehouses and to purchase inventory (Hamilton, D., 2004). Amazon revenues, around $4 billion a year, and is growing by more than 20 percent annually. Marketing, inventory, and warehouse operating costs have been whittled nearly to the bone. Building nine high-tech warehouses, at a cost of about $50 million apiece, parlayed Bezos' idea into the phenomenon that is Amazon.com. While keeping the business at least for then from operating...
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...Mike’s Bikes Paper # 1 Instructions: Complete a five year simulation, and answer the following questions on the actual approach you used for the simulation. You may type your answers directly on this form, but the completed document must be 2-3 pages in length (please do not change the margins). Due November 25, 11:59pm 1. What is your overall strategy (Selling on Price or Value?) A. If selling on low price, what is the implication for decisions you will make on spending (Advertising, PR, Branding, Channel Support, Quality, Efficiency, etc.)? My Overall strategy eventually was to provide a moderately priced product at suggested cost and again and medial quality. After dabbling in the program for a while, I began to somewhat realize how things worked. I noticed through the reports that the Mountain Bike relied mostly on advertising, and PR had a “low” impact on overall sales, so it stated. I began by advertising it heavily in the areas in which the marketing reports stated reached the target audience the most. I completely avoided the PR since it was stated to have little impact on sales for this specific product. I had also avoided Branding at first and wanted to focus more on the when I had multiple products on sale. I began to notice as I went that even though the share price was increasing, my sales and product awareness were lacking, especially in comparison to the competitions sales even though my price was quite lower than theirs. I assume this is due to...
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...chapters occur, we will provide updated vignettes and other information on the book' web site. We anticipate many important developments, hence a lot of updates. Still, the good news is that the basic, fundamental contents of the book will remain the s IS SHAREHOLDER WEALTH MAXIMIZATION A WORLDWIDE GOAL? Most academics agree that shareholder wealth maximization should be a firm’s primary goal, but it’s not clear that people elsewhere really know how to implement it. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a global consulting firm, conducted a survey of 82 Singapore companies to test their understanding and implementation of shareholder value concepts. Ninety percent of the respondents said their firm’s primary goal was to enhance shareholder value, but only 44% had taken steps to achieve this goal. Moreover, almost half of the respondents who had shareholder value programs in place said they were dissatisfied with the results achieved thus far. Even so, respondents who focused on shareholder value were more likely to believe that their stock was fairly valued than those with other focuses, and 50% of those without a specific program said they wanted to learn more and would probably adopt the goal of shareholder wealth maximization eventually. The study found that firms measure performance primarily with accounting-based measures such as the return on assets, equity, or invested capital. These measures are easy to understand and thus to implement, even though they...
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...the shareholder wealth-maximization model of a firm, what is the expected impact of each of the following events on the value of the firm? Explain why New foreign competitors enter the market This would decrease the value of firm because the entry of new foreign competitors means there will be no monopoly market and the firm will have competitors thus reduce it shareholder wealth maximization. Strict pollution control requirements are enacted This would decrease the value of firm because strict pollution control requirements means the increasing of the cost thus the reduce the shareholder wealth maximization. A previously nonunion workforce votes to unionize. This would decrease the value of the firm because the unionization of the workforce would increase the union strike threats with uncertainty of operation. The firm may have to stop it’s operation if the unionization of workforce getting worse thus reduce it shareholder wealth maximization The rate of inflation increases substantially This would decrease the value of firm because increasing of the rate of inflation means the buyer power will reduce thus the sales of the firm also will reduce so the shareholder wealth maximization will decrease. A major technological breakthrough is achieved by the firm, reducing its cost of production This would increase the value of firm because a major technological breakthrough can save a lot of dollar thus increase the firm profit. The increasing of the value of firm...
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...triggers a motivational conflict between CSR and self-enhancement which leads to less favorable brand evaluation. The paper also discusses that no such conflicting impact was observed in openness and conservation concepts. The key finding of this paper is the impact of different brand concepts with reference to CSR that leads to brand evaluation. Introduction Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged as an extremely important concept and has gained the attention of many companies. There have been studies on this topic which illustrates it importance and value that CSR activities can bring in for a firm. The McKinsey conducted a global survey with executives as there respondents with the objective to see how CSR contributes to shareholder value. The results illustrates that a massive chunk of “76% of executive believes that CSR contributes positively to long-term shareholder value, and 55% of executives agree that sustainability helps their companies build a strong reputation” (McKinsey, 2010).This shows that CSR is considered to be extremely important...
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...main goals of financial mangers is shareholder wealth (Ross, Westerfield & Jaffe, 2010). Stakeholders are important but not the ultimate goal of a business. In order to maximize wealth potential for all invested the risk and reward should be carefully considered (Adams, 2008). One technique for doing this is capital budgeting because financial managers are able to make decisions with the proper information about risk and reward (Bloom & Van Reenee, 2010). This may also allow for stakeholder incentives and a share at the wealth. The question may come down to concern over cash flows or profits (Charron, 2007). Cash flows can be a goal of stakeholders where profits are a goal of stockholders. Both stakeholder goals and stockholder goals have benefits. An example, is when dealing with externalities such as pollution with cause maximizing the value of the firm to cause a misallocation of resources (Yoshimori, 1995). In today’s volatile markets and combined focus including stakeholders could be more conducive. The U.K. is similar to the U.S. with corporate governance goals of maximizing shareholder wealth (Yoshimori, 1995). But, Japan is an example of a country that has much broader goals. In Japan the concern is with the larger group of shareholders (Yoshimori, 1995). Japanese Ensures businesses are run in such a way that resources are used efficiently and customers suppliers and employees are taken care of as well as shareholders. Financial managers may have many...
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...Value Based Business Steering / Value Based Management Han Levink 2 maart 2004 1. 1.1 Inleiding Shareholder Value De focus van het management op het creëren van aandeelhouderswaarde heeft de afgelopen jaren in navolging van de Verenigde Staten ook in West Europa een sterke vlucht genomen. Een belangrijke oorzaak van deze toegenomen aandacht is de overnamegolf eind jaren tachtig van de vorige eeuw in de Verenigde Staten. Bedrijven die een zogenaamd positieve “value gap” lieten zien, waren een gewilde prooi voor de zogenaamde “Corporate Raiders”. De value gap kan gedefinieerd worden als het verschil tussen de waarde van de onderneming (indien deze waarde wordt nagestreefd vanuit het oogmerk om aandeelhouderswaarde te maximaliseren) en de huidige marktwaarde (Rappaport, 1998). De verdere globalisering in concurrentie en kapitaalmarkten, alsmede het toegenomen aandelenbezit onder particulieren in Nederland en de rest van West Europa, verklaart waarom deze aandacht voor aandeelhouderswaarde ook in West Europa sterk is toegenomen. In de jaren negentig van de vorige eeuw gingen steeds meer aandeelhouders van het management verlangen dat het bedrijf zou worden gestuurd op aandeelhouderswaarde. Deze druk werd nog versterkt door de toegenomen betrokkenheid van institutionele beleggers Bovendien is er reeds jarenlang sprake van aanzienlijke ontevredenheid met betrekking tot boekhoudkundige winst- en rendementsmaatstaven. De kritiek spitst zich met name toe op het feit dat ondernemingen...
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...Requiements of business Management Systems: A Delineation of the Comprehensive Set of Criteria Bartłomiej NITA* 1 Introduction There are organizations which have serious problems with transforming their strategies in-to actions and achieving good performance, so the major purpose of modern management accounting is to support the strategy execution. However, for fulfilling this goal it is essential to design and implement effective performance measurement and management system in order to asses, control, and finally improve organizational performance. Unfortunately, still a lot of companies today use financial and accounting-based calculations as the ultimate measures of company performance although exclusively financial approach to performance is not sufficient any longer. The aim of the paper is to figure out the requirements that should be fulfilled by modern performance management systems. Thus, in the first part of the article the short review of contemporary approach to performance management was described, in the following part different opinions and discussions from the relevant academic literature were depicted and finally the comprehensive set of ten requirements was proposed. 2 Contemporary Approach to Performance Management In 1965 R. N. Anthony published his seminal work titled “Planning and Control Systems”, in which he introduced the concept of management control. His classic definition of management control...
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...always miss the opportunities to create values for their companies and their shareholders. In this article, the author, noted professor emeritus Alfred Rappaport, set out ten basic governance principles for companies to realize the potential of creating shareholder value. In the real world, there is only Berkshire Hathaway that is likely to implement all these principles. It is obvious that more and more CFOs and other top executives followed Berkshire Hathaway's legendary CEO, Warren Buffet, management skills by following his footsteps to enhance shareholder value. Based on many research and several decades of consulting experience, the author suggests to executives ten maximizing shareholder value principles. For example: Do not provide earnings guidance or manage earnings Try to make shareholder value-maximizing strategic decisions Grasp any opportunities to create shareholder value Focus on high value-added activities (e.g., marketing, design, research) in order to reduce capital expenditures Return cash to the shareholders when there are no opportunities to create value Reward employees in order to motivate them to maximize the potential for high returns Management ignoring long-term considerations because the average time for holding stocks at professionally managed funds is only one year. Investors are usually engaged in pursuit of optimal short-term earnings. However, their actions seem to be the culprit behind value-destroying, for instance, stock option...
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...prompt personnel to leave for other banks? 5 Was stripping of Lewis’ chairmanship a significant move on the part of BoA shareholders? 6 How could Thain justify spending $1.2 million on his office when Merrill Lynch was on the verge of bankruptcy? 7 What did Ken Lewis hope to gain by claiming that he was “pressured” into completing the Merrill Lynch deal? 9 Of all decisions made by Ken Lewis in this case study, which one do you think did the most damage to his reputation? And why? 10 What should Lewis have done? 12 Conclusion 13 References 14 Case Summary Bank of America (BoA), founded in 1998 is an American multinational banking and financial services corporation. They were notably a key player in the global financial crisis that struck in 2008. Ken Lewis, a former CEO acquired Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. To his dismay, the acquisitions turned out to be disastrous as the first week of January 2009 enlightened the problems that existed within Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch; they were bankrupt with assets in their balance sheet that set a new mark for toxicity in the financial market. This required attention and direct aid from the Federal Government itself. However, following this month BoA fell by 65 percent. Just a month after the first quarter of 2009, Ken Lewis was made CEO and stripped off chairmanship by the shareholders’ consent. (Tanoh, 2013) The aftermath of the two acquisitions of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch allowed BoA to become...
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...Topic 1: Analysing the external environment Strategy – direction and scope of an organisation over a long term, which achieves the advantage of changing environment through its configuration of resources and competencies with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations. Direction – Mission, vision, and course Scope – broad or narrow strategy Long term – 5-10years Environment – General environment & industry environment Resources – tangible and intangible Capabilities – capacity of organisation to integrate and deploy resources to achieve an obj. Stakeholders – society, suppliers, creditors, shareholders, employees, customers Levels of strategy * Corporate * Business General environment (Macro) – broad collection of factors that directly or indirectly have the potential to influence every firm in ever industry within the economy PESTDG framework * Identify trends * Explain trends * State if opportunity or threat * Explain why is it an opportunity or threat Segment | Trends | Political / Legal | Changes to workplace relations, carbon tax law | Economical | Rising interest rates, GFC, inflation rate, unemployment rate | Socio-cultural | Climate change, increase in casual workers, greater concern for health | Technological | Wireless communications, cloud computing, growth in hand held devices | Demographical | Aging population, growing disparity in income level | Global | Growth in Chinese and Indian economy, free...
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...An analysis of the results of For the year ended 2nd April 2006 Report devised and prepared by Duncan Williamson www.duncanwil.co.uk May, June and July 2006 3rd Edition Marks and Spencer Analysis Introduction This article concerns Marks and Spencer and came about following the publication of their annual financial results. There is nothing extraordinary about the results apart from two things! • • They were very big news in the business and ordinary press They have been prepared under International Financial Reporting Standards rather than under UK Financial Reporting Standards The second point took me a little by surprise for the simple reason that it didn’t seem to cause a fuss. I expected a few more explanations by accountants and analysts over the restatement of 2005’s results and the potential impact on 2005 and 2006 and beyond of the application of IFRS. Of course, M&S published comparative figures for the IFRS based results for the latest year and they restated the previous year as they should. However, I seem to be the only person who is worried or concerned or bothered in the slightest about the potential for smoke and mirrors lying behind some or all of what was revealed. Why am I worried? Well, M&S is still trying to work its way out of a fairly tough trading period and coming at the end of the transition to IFRS I wanted to hear what analysts thought about what I was worried about. This is the second edition of this article and the final section...
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...Case Report on Executive Compensation In the modern society, chief executive officer has become the most important part to many companies especially to the publicly listed corporations. They generally make a significant contribution to the profitability of their firm. However, in some case the managers’ interests conflict with their companies’, and thus their decisions may probably do not maximize their companies’ value. Therefore, it is a problem that how shareholders ensure that top executives want to maximize their wealth. This paper explores the principle for compensation, makes an attempt to design a new compensation package to the chief executive officer of Nike, Inc., and finally compare the different between the existing pay package and the new one. I. Introduction Nike, which originally named as Blue Ribbon Sports, is the largest manufacturer of the athletic footwear and apparel in the world, and one of the Fortune 500 companies. Figure1 shows that Nike is the leader of the global athletic footwear market, with around 31% market share in 2007. Creating by Bill Bowerman and Philip Knight in 1962, its early products are footwear, but now it has a wide range of product line. Today Nike is engaged in design, development and marketing of footwear, apparel and equipment, including shoes, sock, gloves, bags, and sports balls and so on. Many of its products are design for specific athletic such as football, basketball, running and even walking. According to figure2,...
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...Table of Contents I. Introduction 2 II. Customer portfolio concept 3 2.1 Concept of customer portfolio and its application in company 3 2.1.1 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 3 2.1.2 Market segmentation 4 2.1.3 Sales forecasting methods 5 2.1.4 Activity based costing 6 2.2 Customer portfolio application of “CDNow” 6 2.3. Concept application for e-tailer companies 8 III. Conclusion 10 References 11 Introduction In business, customers are always considered as the basis of a company’s profitability (Gupta et al., 2004; Hogan et al., 2002; Rappaport, 1998; Wayland and Cole, 1994). It leads to a customer – centric view in practice in general as well as in marketing in particular. According to Rust et al., (2005), the limited resources allocated efficiently for maximizing value requires a relationship – oriented customers and strong, long – lasting customer retention. Focusing on current customers is the right strategy, especially offering a positive lifetime profitability relationship when acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones (Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Reichheld and Teal, 1996; Bitran & Mondschein, 1997). However, there is not only lifetime profitability relationship, but also different treatments of customers in marketing tools are advisable. Determining the right strategic balance between acquisition...
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...1. Different accounting theories will provide alternative explanations about why an entity might decide to report social and environmental information. Positive accounting theory tries to make good prediction of real world events and translate them to accounting transactions, while normative theories tend to recommend what should be done. Positive theories try to explain and predict actions such as which accounting policies firms will choose and how firms will react to newly proposed accounting standards. Its overall intention is to understand and predict the choice of accounting policies across differing firms; it recognizes that economic consequences exist( Colignon, R. and M. Covaleski. 1991).Under PAT firms want to maximize their prospects for survival, so they organize themselves efficiently. Firms are viewed as the accumulation of the contracts they have entered into. In relation to PAT, because there is a need to be efficient, the firm will want to minimize costs associated with contracts. Examples of contract costs are negotiation, renegotiation and monitoring costs; contract costs involve accounting variables as contracts can be stipulated in terms of accounting information such as net income and financial ratios. The firm will choose the accounting policies that best acknowledge the need for minimization of contract costs (Danos, P. 1977). PAT recognizes that changing circumstances require managers to have flexibility in choosing accounting policies. This bring forward...
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