Case Study: Frequent Restructuring at Sony Corporation

Sony Corporation is a multinational conglomerate based in Japan. The organisation’s core business is in Electronics and Entertainments. It has grow from barely 20 employees with about ¥190,000 as its capital in 1946 to today with about 150,000 employees worldwide and worth about $15 billion dollars on the share market as of May 2012. Sony has always put innovation as its main business focus. Due to its innovative business model Sony was able to bring us the very innovative products such as Walkman, Playstation, CD player and Camcorders and others. In the way all these products made Sony become a premium brand in the world, it can command the premium prices for its products. But later on Sony became so big, within there are many different divisions. The goal of Sony was to improve the financial performance and competitiveness of the company. Therefore, from the year 1994, Sony had gone Continue reading

Case Study on Information Systems: Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems advertises itself as the company on which the Internet runs, and this San Jose, California, company does dominate the sale of network routers and switching equipment used for Internet infrastructure. Under the leadership of CEO John Chambers, it has been so successful that it even briefly became the most valuable company on earth in early 2000, reaching a valuation of $555 billion and a stock price of more than $80 per share. One key to its success is that Cisco uses information systems and the Internet in every way it can. However, by April 2001 the stock closed below $14, a decline of more than 80 percent, while the company value fell to around $100 billion. What was to blame for this precipitous plunge? What role did Cisco’s information systems play? Cisco was founded in 1984 by Stanford University computer scientists looking for an easier and better way Continue reading

Important Types of Price Elasticity of Demand

Generally, consumers and sellers react differently in the market in response to a given change in the price of some products or services. In most cases, especially where the goods produced are elastic, when the prices of such commodities increase, customers counter the adjustment by lowering the quantity of the goods they consume. Similarly, if the cost decreases, buyers are likely to purchase a good volume of the product being offered. In other words, the consumption of the goods moves in the opposite direction from the prices. The products that portray such behavior are mainly consumer durables that customers can postpone their usage when the prices increase too high. For instance, assuming the cost of a car increases, the buyer may opt not to buy the product, thus reducing the number of items sold significantly. By understanding the concept of price elasticity of demand, such as various types and critical factors Continue reading

Top Tips For Managing Your Credit

Credit is a useful tool to extend your wealth and allow you to reach commodities you wouldn’t be able to before. Vacations, extravagant gifts, and fun activities might not be affordable to you without the help of credit. However, if you don’t manage your credit correctly, you can easily fall behind on payments and start getting into debt. To help you avoid paying more than you need to, here are some tips you should always keep in your mind. Consolidate Your Loans The first thing you need to do is collect all of your debts and put them into one place. This “one place” should be a consolidation loan. The idea is to make the loan as easy to understand as possible. Instead of having two loans with one bank, a credit card with another, a store card, and more, you take out a loan designed to pay the other Continue reading

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH)

Market Efficiency The concept of market efficiency was first developed in the finance literature and its full form was first explained by Engene Fama. But now-a-days this concept is being used in other areas also.  Market efficiency implies that prices reflect all available information, but it does  not imply certain knowledge.   Many pieces of information that are available and reflected in prices are fairly uncertain.   Efficiency of markets does not eliminate that uncertainty and therefore does not imply perfect forecasting ability.  By definition then there should not exist any unexplained opportunities for profit. “An ‘efficient’ market is defined as a market where there are large numbers of rational, profit-maximizers actively competing, with each trying to predict future market values of individual securities, and where important current information is almost freely available to all participants. In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation Continue reading

Promotional Pricing – Meaning, Types, Advantages, and Disadvantages

Marketing includes a very important concept that is marketing mix; it has four major components that are promotion, people, price, and place. Nevertheless, in the marketing mix after the product, the second most important factor is the kind of price that is being used. This is because the distribution and the promotion mix can be modified by the kind of pricing being used. It can be an enormous job to set up the correct price for products and services while establishing a new company and it could be equally for a company that has a year of existence on the market. The problem could be that if prices are set too high, the risk may be losing customers or customers may not be interested in the product at all. If prices are set to low, the risk may be not returned on the investment and extremely low margins. Before establishing Continue reading