Question

Individual Stakeholders Report

Letter to Shareholders Assignment Details

This is an individual assignment.

Assume you are the CEO of the organization established in your simulation team (i.e. Andrews, Baldwin, etc.).

Your responsibility now is to construct the Annual Letter to Shareholders for this organization. For the annual report, include information regarding the changes from round 6 into round 7 that provides stockholders with the most up to date results and identifies projected decisions and desired outcomes expected by implementing your decisions.

Professionalism is critical when preparing the letter. Be sure that you utilize the key concepts from the text that apply to all areas of this letter.

Your letter must include the following:

Section 1 – Review the past

• Detail your overall competitive strategy; i.e. cost leadership, focus, differentiation, or a combination of any of the competitive strategies and why it was selected.
• Data and analysis regarding highpoints from the previous year and decisions that lead to this success.
• Data and analysis regarding the biggest challenges and the decisions that led to poor performance. Be sure to describe why it happened and what areas of the business were impacted. Include what you see as two or three key lessons learned.
• Note: this section should be approximately 40% of the actual letter’s content

Section 2 – Future Vision

• Based on your results, construct new strategies for the upcoming year to maximize organizational strengths and overcome weaknesses in results by completing a detailed SWOT matrix along with an analysis of its content. The explanation should include how you believe this new strategy will impact / address the problem areas and which areas of the business will ultimately be effected.
• Evaluate and describe any current or potential ethical, legal or sustainable business practices within the business or the industry identified in an environmental scan and VRIO analysis that need to be addressed in the upcoming year and the tactics you have developed to overcome these challenges.
• Note: this section should be approximately 50% of the actual letter’s content

Section 3 – Leadership Conclusion

• Complete the Shareholder Letter with a description of your leadership style/philosophy and why they should continue to invest in you and the firm.
• Note: this section should be approximately 10% of the actual letter’s content

The letter should be between 9-12 double spaced pages written in business format. Graphs and charts can be embedded into the document. First person is acceptable.

Be certain that conclusions are supported by data and that this is a professionally written document.

Answer 1

Dear fellow shareholder year 2019 was an exceptional year in exceptional times. We reached a milestone, our 150th but this achievement comes as our industry is at a crossroads. Expectations of the comapany is changing substantially as consumers embrace new trends, habits and lifestyles. We see a reshaping of the competitive environment. We are on the brink of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’; a transformation of society that will be unlike anything we have experienced before, presenting us with challenges but also great opportunities. We are responding by sharpening our focus and strengthening our efforts to create value. We are investing in science and innovation, and building new capabilities and platforms to secure our long-term prospects while at the same time delivering the sustainable, profitable growth you expect from us.

There was great job done Specially i would like to thanks you my champions Andrews, Baldwin and team for such a great performance and leadership ..We have always balanced investing for the long-term with delivering against our current financial commitments to drive growth in today’s challenging trading environment. We have increased investment behind our brands and sustained it.

Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership are customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand  and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.

Because of our emphasis on the long term goal, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders Andrews, Baldwin and team that may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy:

• We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.

• We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.

• We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.

• We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.

• When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.

• We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments.

• We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses.

• We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.

• We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.

Failure needs to scale too also -

As a company grows everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures is not growing you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Our Company will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments usally but we will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

Our Company focus is on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees who can think like owners. Achieving that requires investing in our employees and as with so many other things we use not just analysis but also intuition and heart to find our way forward.

There were many Good and bad experiences that happened but we learned alot of lessons from both the experiences .Sometimes in business you do know where you are going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

As stated above also there were different strategies used and implemented and many worked out also and some resulted in Failure also.

A company vision statement is an important part of a business plan's overview. It is one part your dream for your company and another part the path you're laying for your business in the future. The vision statement is generally written with a long-term perspective in mind.

We are still in the early stages of learning how to bring new value to our customers through Internet commerce and merchandising. Our goal remains to continue to solidify and extend our brand and customer base. This requires sustained investment in systems and infrastructure to support outstanding customer convenience, selection, and service while we grow. We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments. We also believe there are significant opportunities to better serve our customers overseas, such as reducing delivery times and better tailoring the customer experience. To be certain, a big part of the challenge for us will lie not in finding new ways to expand our business, but in prioritizing our investments.

We are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. The challenges and hurdles we will face to make our long-term vision for our Company are aggressive, capable, well-funded competition; considerable growth challenges and execution risk; the risks of product and geographic expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity. . We feel good about what we have done  and even more excited about what we want to do.

Last year was indeed an incredible year. We are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement.

Thanks and Regards