Decision Making As a Critical Part of Good Management Essay

Decision Making As a Critical Part of Good Management - Essay Example This report is based on certain scenarios of NENE, Benjamin and Peters Limited that are faced with different situations and require financial decision making on the choice of project, company evaluation as well as production decisions. The report will use financial calculations of various business analysis tools to help with the decision making. The report will be confined to the information provided in the particular case studies when making decisions. Other outside sources such as books and journals are also used to reinforce certain calculations, principles and analysis tools when making decisions concerning particular case studies. Alpha Payback period: 2 years (representing the year just before the cumulative cash flow becomes positive) + 31/38 (representing the remaining period for the project to achieve the zero cumulative cash flow amount). Therefore, the Payback period for project Alpha will be 231/38 years or 2.82 years. Beta Payback period: 3 years (representing the last year where the cumulative cash flow is still negative) + 5/35 (representing the proportion of years left for the last negative cash flow amount to become zero). Therefore, the Payback period for Beta project will be 3 5/35 years or 3.14years. The Average annual Operating profit is calculated by adding up all the operating profits provided for the six years period and dividing by the number of years. This comes to (205,000 / 6) = 34, 167.7 equivalent to 34,200 pounds. But this is the amount of depreciation. With the annual depreciation rate being 18,000 (100,000 – 10,000) / 5 = 18,000 pounds, the average annual operating profit will be the average annual profit minus depreciation. Which is 16,200 (34,200 – 18,000). This is the amount of depreciation. To advise NENE Limited on the most appropriate project to undertake, all the four appraisal methods must be evaluated. To begin with, using the cash flows of the two projects, it is vividly clear that that project Alpha seems a good project as it has more cash flow ( £105,000) than project Beta ( £83,000).  Ã‚  

Managing In golbal market Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Managing In golbal market - Essay Example This internationalisation strategy report identifies two viable markets for entry, Kuwait and Brazil. In Kuwait, consumers are experiencing increased disposable income levels and consumer behaviour factors represent favourable conditions for consumer acceptance of Taco Bell and its diverse product lines. Brazil maintains stable economic conditions and also encouraging consumer behaviour which can enhance Taco Bell’s ability to improve its internationally-based revenue stream. With the chain’s intention of opening one new store, internationally, every few days (Wong 2014), Brazil and Kuwait can ensure this goal is achieved and market conditions in these two countries represent stability upon market entry. This strategy report utilises many strategic models to analyse market conditions in Brazil and Kuwait as viable markets for the chain’s growth. The report’s deliverables include a full understanding of the political, economic and social factors of both markets, the competitive environment, and specific strategic initiatives that must be established to make market entry a success and ensure profit longevity. The threats and risks in both markets are also identified that might contribute to challenges upon market entry with appropriate recommendations for overcoming any barriers to entering both markets. The Kuwaiti government recognises the opportunities for attracting foreign investment. Recently, Kuwait has established a Free Trade Zone in the city of Shuwaikh, a region closely adjacent to the Iran border, a region sustaining an important international airport, and sustaining a shipping port that facilitates recurring movement of goods via water transport systems. This Free Trade Zone provides foreign companies with complete tax exemption on earnings for 10 years upon market entry (Singh 2010). Hence, the endeavours of the Kuwaiti government to entice foreign investment provide Taco

What are the main problems in China that can derail its economic Essay - 1

What are the main problems in China that can derail its economic growth - Essay Example The exports of China have reduced significantly in the recent years. In March 2012, the Chinese government declared that the Chinese economy and its gross domestic product (GDP) are expected to grow at a slower rate of around 7.5% during the year 2012. The slowdown in the rate of economic growth in China had an adverse impact on the overall condition of the global economy. This is so because China is responsible for around 20 percent of the total economic output of the world. Besides, many Asian countries are also highly dependent on the Chinese economy and its market conditions (Hart, 2012). It would be a daunting task for most of the multinational corporations engaged in the manufacturing industrial sector to register significant profits if the Chinese economic growth rate slows down. The Central Bank of China has already started taking steps through reduction in the interest rates to help the economic recovery process of China and boost the lending process in the country. This ste p was taken up by the Chinese Central Bank to protect the country’s economy from the adverse effect of ongoing financial crisis situation in the European nations. The eminent economists worldwide suggest that capital infusion would not be able to solve these growth issues of the Chinese economy in an effective manner. It is so because with the increase in funds being pumped into the economy by the Chinese government would ultimately lead to increased consumer costs and inflation. Previously it was projected that China would experience a robust economic growth in the future but there are many barriers in the path of the economic development of the country. Some of those barriers include bureaucracy, shortage in energy, reducing levels of export because of decreasing demand of Chinese manufactured products in some of the major markets like UK and USA, social unrest in the country, increase in aging Chinese population, and so on. According to a report published by BBC News in th e month of July 2012, China experienced a slowdown in its economic growth rate to around 7.6 percent. This study entails about discussing and analysing the various negative effects that certain economic factors are having on the Chinese economic growth at present and in the foreseeable future. China contributes significantly towards the overall growth of the world economy. Hence, unstable and unsustainable Chinese economy is having a significant impact in deterring the global economic condition. This study would try to shed light on some of the major problems faced by China which can be responsible for slowing down the economic growth rate of the nation in the forthcoming years. Five such major factors have been discussed in details in this study. They are : a) International trade and exports by China, b) Problems related to Chinese currency and the foreign exchange regulations prevalent in the country, c) Problems associated with the increasing aging population of the country, d) T he rising levels of income inequality within the country, and e) The present bad conditions of the Chinese banking industry. All these five reasons can hinder the path of economic development of China in a significant manner. The central idea of this study is

Managing In golbal market Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Managing In golbal market - Essay Example This internationalisation strategy report identifies two viable markets for entry, Kuwait and Brazil. In Kuwait, consumers are experiencing increased disposable income levels and consumer behaviour factors represent favourable conditions for consumer acceptance of Taco Bell and its diverse product lines. Brazil maintains stable economic conditions and also encouraging consumer behaviour which can enhance Taco Bell’s ability to improve its internationally-based revenue stream. With the chain’s intention of opening one new store, internationally, every few days (Wong 2014), Brazil and Kuwait can ensure this goal is achieved and market conditions in these two countries represent stability upon market entry. This strategy report utilises many strategic models to analyse market conditions in Brazil and Kuwait as viable markets for the chain’s growth. The report’s deliverables include a full understanding of the political, economic and social factors of both markets, the competitive environment, and specific strategic initiatives that must be established to make market entry a success and ensure profit longevity. The threats and risks in both markets are also identified that might contribute to challenges upon market entry with appropriate recommendations for overcoming any barriers to entering both markets. The Kuwaiti government recognises the opportunities for attracting foreign investment. Recently, Kuwait has established a Free Trade Zone in the city of Shuwaikh, a region closely adjacent to the Iran border, a region sustaining an important international airport, and sustaining a shipping port that facilitates recurring movement of goods via water transport systems. This Free Trade Zone provides foreign companies with complete tax exemption on earnings for 10 years upon market entry (Singh 2010). Hence, the endeavours of the Kuwaiti government to entice foreign investment provide Taco

A Book That Has Had an Impact on Me Essay Example for Free

A Book That Has Had an Impact on Me Essay During my fourth year of secondary school, I became acutely aware of the Women’s Rights Issue. I made an attempt to re-examine many of the cultural norms that I had previously accepted as just being the natural order of things. One of the paths I took to expand my awareness of the female psyche involved womens literature. That is why I spent one weekend of my life in bedcrying, laughing, feeling sometimes confused, and often, incredibly angry and distraught. On that rainy Humboldt Friday night I had decided to read The Womens Room. The author, Marilyn Fridey, describes the lives of several women from the 1950s to present. These women are nothing out of the ordinary. They either go to college and then get married, or they get married without bothering about the pretense of collegeafter all, they know that college is only a way to find more economically promising husbands. Myra, the main character whose life is traced throughout the book vaguely wonders why she is not content cooking pot roast, scraping shit from the babys diapers, and picking up her husbands dry cleaning. See more: Strategic Management Process Essay Her only solace is the neighborhood of women who share concerns over coffee in the afternoons. They wonder why Katherine, a Catholic woman who has 9 children and an alcoholic husband, committed suicide. She had a normal life, they thought, she just should have talked her husband into using birth control. As for the rest of the women, including Myra, their lives, fears, disappointments and yearnings, were much more subtle, yet equally suicidal in their quiet desperation. Many years down the road, Myras life finally changes. Her husband has made it, the kids have grown, and life is easy economically. Myra has a nervous breakdown. Once recovered, she divorces, and becomes a graduate student at Yale. Though painful and difficult, it is here that she comes to terms with herself, realizes her potential, and learns to live with herselfnot necessarily happilybut at least honestly. After I finished the story of Myras world that Sunday evening, I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing uncontrollably from a terrible nightmare. Though I couldnt remember the dream, I came to a profound realization. Myras life was my mothers. Most of my life I had revered, respected and admired my father for going to college, being intelligent and worldly, having power and control. In short for being a man. My mother always seemed too wishy-washy, easily trodden upon, overly dependent because she had chosen the role of housewife, mother. I rebelled against the tradition, and feared wearing those chains someday. Consequently, I strove to be like my father. Until this book, I never realized how much more courage it took for a person to live within a stifled role, and find contentment by living through other people. During that night of crying I understood my mother for the first timeI respected her inner strength, compassion, gentleness. Ever since then, my relationship with my mother has evolved, and we are very close. I will probably never adopt the role in life that she chose to take, but I now respect her for her life, and understand the reasons why she made those choices. Reading of Myras evolution as a female changed the way I feel towards myself, my feelings and compassion for my mother, and provided me with a much more sensitive view towards the lives of many women in our society today.

The Strategies to achieve competitive positions

The Strategies to achieve competitive positions Choose one of the four competitive positions mentioned in the strategy lecture and discuss, using examples, the marketing strategies an organisation would employ to achieve that position. Competitive strategies are chosen by firms depending on their roles in the market leader, challenger, follower or nicher. This essay will focus on firms who are market leaders and what marketing strategies are used to help them achieve that position. Every industry has its own market leader. Kotler, P. (2005) believes the market leader is one that has the largest market share or highest profitability margin in a given market for goods and services. Market leader often leads other firms in product innovation, price changes; distribution channels and promotion strategies. Good examples of market leaders would be Apple with their ranges of IPod, touch phones and tablet computer, Google with its search engine, social networking Facebook and Tesco (supermarket chains). Market leadership is extremely important. Almost every firm wants to be the first in the market. The reason is not only the revenue but it is because most customers prefer to buy from leaders. They perceive leaders to be better and they perceive leaders to be a safer purchase. Reference groups are great in influencing consumers behaviour. People tend to buy from where everyone else buys, this helps strengthening the leaders position. To become a market leader, a firm needs to own and control the relevant technology in whatever market it is in either through the use of patent or other proprietary protections. Moreover, it needs to adopt and implement better technologies directly, whenever they become available, regardless of whether or not any other organisations are currently using them. It is critical to be the first to use a technology or create a category for a product. Then make it an industry standard. Baines, P., Fill, C. Page, K. (2008) defined the two main strategies used by firms to achieve market leadership position are: Attack the market Defend the position Apart from expanding the total demand and protecting market share, the market leaders should try to expanding market share, even if market size remains constant (Kotler Gary, 2005). Forth strategy is proposed by Brassington, F Pettitt, S. (2006) who believed that companies should also seek stability and retention of customer base. In this essay, the four strategies will be analysed with appropriate examples of firms that applied those strategies successfully and firms that failed during competition. Attack the market Attack the market can be operated in different ways. The firms can create new uses, new consumers categories or increase frequency of use. This strategy is extremely popular as the dominant firm normally gains the most when the total market expands. In general, the market leader should look for new customers or more usage from existing customers. Every product has the potential of attracting buyers who are unaware of the product or who are still under consideration because of price or the products do not have some certain features. A company can search for new users among three groups: those who might use it but do not (market-penetration strategy), those who have never used it (new-market segment strategy), or those who live elsewhere (geographical-expansion strategy). Example: Johnson Johnson baby shampoo was losing market share due to birth rate declining, they had expand their customers segmentation, targeting adults which helped them regain their leader position. (New user) Kelloggs Crunchy Nut has expanded their ranges and introduced snack bars which increase frequency of use, relatively increase sales of the product. Defend the position/Protect market share The leader must constantly monitor the market because the market challenger is persistently trying to take away market share or worse, to replace the leaders position in the market. The firms can defend their positions in the market and their market share by monitoring their position, regular innovation; eliminate any weaknesses, price cutting and discount, increases promotion. Defend the position in the market is a difficult task for market leaders since they may be under attack from numbers of different competitors small to medium firms in the existing market or big players want to expand from a completely different industry. Although defence strategies may require a deployment of resources to defend different parts of the operation, it is hard of a challenger brand to dislodge a market leader if the market leader is actively defending territory. There are six different ways in defense strategy which are: Position defense (purely defensive is not enough, firms must take offensive counter-measure). It is considered as the least successful in the defense strategies. This defense was use by Mercedes until Toyota launched a frontal attack with its Lexus. Mobile defense (more than aggressively defend, stretches domain over new territories) E.g.: Legend Holdings, the top China PC maker Legend has announced a joint venture with AOL to broaden its business to provide Internet services in the mainland. Flanking defense (guarding territory is not enough, firms must create outposts/flanks to protect weak front and invasion base for counter attack) E.g. Gold Eagle is a flanking brand introduced by San Miguel in the Philippines as a defense against APBs Beerhausen. Contraction defense (strategic withdrawal: give up weak territories, concentrates strength and resources at more dependable areas). The market leader must make its own assessment to prioritise the importance of territories and should be willing to relinquish those that are not important to defend for those that are. E.g. Indias TATA Group sold its soaps and detergents business units to Unilever in 1993 or Ford retired T-birds and Probe to focus on Contour and Taurus. Pre-emptive defense (Detect potential attacks and attack the enemies first) Seiko with 2,300 watch models is considered as a successful example for this category while Heinz proved failure as they did not respond to Hunts attack which leaded to Hunt established a rival brand. Counter-offensive defense (Respond to competitors head-on attack by identifying the attackers weakness and then launch a counter attack) E.g. Toyota launched the Lexus to respond to Mercedes attack. Continuous innovation is considered as the best way to protect market share and is required for long-term leadership. When leaders become self-satisfied with their products or services, it becomes easier for the challenger to make progress. In large markets, small increases in market share can turn into great sales increases; a one-point gain in market share can be worth hundreds of millions of pounds. However not every firm understands the importance of continuous innovative process and often failed in retaining their positions in the market. Companies are hindered from investing and following through with innovation because they fear cannibalising established products (Tellis Golder, 1996). In order to protect mainframe sales, IBM obstructed its development of minicomputers and workstations while competitors kept making inroads into the mainframe market. Another reason why companies are less worried about innovation is that they are satisfied with their progress. Yahoo was satisfied with its social networking Yahoo 360Â  [1]Â  until the company started to lose market share to Facebook and Friendster in Asia. Thirdly, large bureaucracies can discourage innovations or slow the progress when companies bring new products to market. GM and IBM are well-known examples for this problem. Despite their technological strength and financial resources, both companies were slow to bring out new products because of their bureaucratic approval process. Firms that do well in continuous innovation are Apple, Procter Gamble. Apple was certainly not the first manufacturer to MP3 players but its iPod was totally different to anything else on the market at the time of its release. Apple has a large range of IPod from IPod shuffle, IPod Nano with stylish shapes or IPod classic for music lovers as they can hold a great number of files and IPod touch for multifunctional uses. The firm also introduced to its customers a range of IPhone from 2G-3GS and promising the new version of IPhone (IPhone 5) in 2011. Procter Gamble the worlds largest consumer products company- takes innovation seriously which shown in their heavily investment in innovative process. They outspend competition in Research and Development believing if they provide branded products of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the worlds consumers, consumers will reward them with leadership sales, profit and value creations. They are well-known for their open innovation outlook. As not all brilliant ideas are coming from internal, it is critically for firms to seek new ideas, innovations from outside. PG has introduced three different networks in which they encouraged their employees to interact with outside world or link different companies in different part of the world working towards a same goal. By doing this, they have received exceptional amount of new ideas, innovative products to increase sales and market share in consumers market. Expand market share Expand market share can gain great profits for the company but there is a drawback. Too many customers can put a strain on the firms resources, hurting product value and service delivery. Example: America Online experienced growing pains when its customer base expanded, resulting in system outages and access problems (Kotler Keller, 2006). Consumers may also infer that bigger is not better and assume that growth will lead to a deterioration of quality. If exclusivity is a key brand benefit, existing customer may resent additional new customers. (Kotler Keller, 2006) This strategy can be operated via the marketing mix. However this strategy can provoke antitrust action or anti-dumping charge. Vietnamese rice export market has received multiple charges on dumping issues in European market trying to gain more market share in short period of time. Economic cost such as legal costs needs to be taking in consideration. Wrong marketing mix strategy is also one of the problems firms face when expanding market share (for example: focus on unattractive segments). Successful example of firm in expanding market share is Starbucks. The company plans to continue to rapidly expand its retail operations, grow its specialty sales and other operations, and selectively pursue opportunities to leverage the Starbucks brand through the introduction of new products and the development of new distribution channels. Seek stability and retention of customer base Tesco is a great example for applying this strategy. They try to retain customers loyal via promotion and Club card which customers can save as they shop and spend the points on various products. Tesco seeks stability, it competes on prices with rivals such as Sainsburys and Asda, although it also focuses on customer service, how to deliver good service with reasonable price to the customers. It is important that leader firms understand their strengths and weaknesses, also have a clear view of their competitors in the market. Choosing the right defense strategy is critical in order to retain their position as leaders and continue to expand the total market and market share, as well as profitability. Market leaders should take innovation seriously in order to stay in the leading position.

black boy :: essays research papers

This novel is set in Harlem in New York City. The Grimes migrate to the North in search of new opportunities. Elizabeth bids goodbye to her aunt in Maryland and leaves with Richard. She arrives in New York with great expectations but she is sorely disappointed. "Here, in this great city where no one cared, where people might live in the same building for years and never speak to one another, she found herself, when Richard took her in his arms, on the edge of a steep place and down she rushed, on the descent uncaring, into the dreadful sea." New York is a big and bustling city but it is heartless. The only way Elizabeth and Richard make their existence meaningful is by visiting places of interest in the city on weekends. They go to the Central Park or the Museum of Natural history to take their mind off from the daily drudgery. John Grimes does the same when he has to escape out of his dingy quarters at Harlem. He climbs a hill nearby to view New York in all its majesty and imagines himself to be an influential figure in the city. From there he walks over to mid-town Manhattan and Central Park to get a feel of the city. John experiences a sense of freedom in all the places outside his home at Harlem. His house was "narrow and dirty; nothing could alter its dimensions, no labour could ever make it clean. Dirt was in the walls and the floorboards, and triumphed beneath the sink where roaches spawned; was in the fine ridges of the pots and pans, scoured daily, burnt black on the bottom, hanging above the store; was in the wall against which they hung, and revealed itself where the paint had cracked and leaned outward in stiff squares and fragments, the paper-thin underside webbed with black." In similar quarters live Florence and other Negroes like her. If they look out of their window, they can see "scraps of paper and frosty dust, and --- the hanging signs of stores and storefront churches." In the evenings, the Negro families visit the churches at Harlem called the ‘Temple of the Fire Baptized.’ "It was not the biggest church in Harlem, nor yet the smallest, but John had been brought up to believe it was the holiest and best." John and Roy attend the