9.Executive Compensation Critics have charged that compensation to top managers in the United States is too high and should be cut back. For example, focusing on large corporations, Dara Khosrowshahi (now at Uber, formerly of Expedia) has been one of the best-compensated CEOs in the United States, earning about $95 million in 2016. Are such amounts excessive? In answering, it might be helpful to recognize that superstar athletes such as Cristiano Ronaldo, top earners in the entertainment field such as James Cameron and Oprah Winfrey, and many others at the top of their respective fields earn at least as much, if not a great deal more
In: Finance
what is capital as defined in the financial industry?
In: Finance
1.Using Carrol’s pyramid of CSR and information from the case study, identify the corporate social responsibilities of Philip Morris International in the context of its operations in North Carolina. In your view, discuss why these responsibilities are important to Philip Morris International?
The US children working in tobacco fields: 'I wanted to help my mama'
Luis is just 14 years old, but he already has an exhausting, dawn-till-dusk job. Last summer, he started working in tobacco fields in North Carolina.
Even though Luis is just a child – too young to buy cigarettes – it is legal for him to work here in the US.
The job pays about $7.25 per hour.
Monday through Saturday last summer, when he was not in school, he rose at 5am, dressed in long sleeves, jeans, boots, gloves, a hat and a plastic poncho, and waited for a van to drive him to fields as far as an hour away. He came home around 7pm. This is a typical schedule for laborers in this tough and dangerous job.
Workers in tobacco are vulnerable to heat sickness, in temperatures which regularly reach 32C (89F); they risk injuries from sharp objects; and, if the Trump administration has its way, children will return to using the most toxic agrochemicals.
Then there is the plant itself. Tobacco naturally contains water-soluble nicotine. This makes morning dew or overnight rain a vehicle for huge doses of nicotine. Workers are regularly exposed to six cigarettes’ worth of nicotine per day, one study found. This can result in acute nicotine poisoning, called green tobacco sickness, characterized by nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness.
“I wanted to help my mama,” said Luis. He wanted to work, he said, “to get school supplies, so she doesn’t have to waste money”. Luis is the son of a cervical cancer survivor. He started to work when his mother, a waitress, was too ill to hold a job. (The Guardian has changed the names of workers and their families in this report.)
“It’s heavy work, very hard,” said Luis’s mother. But, she said, “there’s no choice”. Children need to help buy “clothes, shoes, their own things, things they need”. She said it would be “better when they were older, but he started because I had cancer ... He was helping me as well as my older son.”
In the US, lax laws and an informal economy in which landowners are removed from hiring laborers allow teens to work growing and harvesting tobacco. This contravenes some tobacco companies’ own policies, which often prohibit children from performing hazardous work.
“There’s a lot of 14-, 15-year-olds working in the fields,” said Antonio, a 19-year-old who has done so since he was 15, a history confirmed by his mother. “They need money or they want to work,” Antonio said.
Altria, parent company of Philip Morris USA, which produces Marlboro cigarettes, said growers were “prohibited from hiring those less than 16 years of age, and may only assign hazardous duties to workers 18 and older. Both are above the legal requirements. We require parental consent for those under 18 working in tobacco farming.”
The company also said it reviewed all growers every three years. In 2017, it found only one case of child labor, in which a farmer hired two 15-year-olds.
“While the individuals were no longer employed by the grower, the contract requirements were reviewed with the grower to strengthen their understanding of the minimum age requirement,” the company said. The company also said it had hired third-party assessors to monitor labor conditions.
Miguel Coleta, director of sustainability for Philip Morris International, said the company had been “making progress in tackling complex labor issues on farms supplying to PMI and our standards exceed US in many areas”.
“Challenges remain, and PMI continues to work with Verité and the Farm Labor Practices Group on systemic issues associated with child labor, grievance mechanisms to protect workers’ rights and to achieve meaningful improvements on the ground,” said Coleta.
In 2015, PMI adopted a new leaf-buying model in the US, and it now buys through the third-party leaf buyers Alliance One International Inc and Universal Leaf North America. At the time, Human Rights Watch said the move would improve labor conditions on US farms.
The Guardian interviewed several teens, parents, and labor organizers for this story. They described a picture in which child labor was commonplace. However, many said they depended on their children’s income to make ends meet. Many of those interviewed also work in other crops, including picking cucumbers, peppers or other vegetables.
“It’s the fact that we have to do it, because there is no alternative,” said Laticia Savala, a labor organizer with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (Floc) in North Carolina. Floc does not support outlawing child labor in fields, because organizers feel it would harm families who depend on children’s income. However, needing the money does not lessen the harm.
“What mom wouldn’t want their kids studying [rather] than working in the fields?” asked Savala. “You’re forced into doing something.” If labor conditions on farms “were better, probably child labor wouldn’t exist”.
The world’s largest tobacco-producing countries span the globe. They include Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Pakistan and the United States.
Together, North Carolina and Kentucky produce 70% of the 700m pounds of tobacco grown in the US each year. Only 0.04% of US farmland grows tobacco, but the United States is still an international juggernaut, the fourth-largest producer in the world.
North Carolina is just one part of a global supply chain that feeds cigarette makers with tobacco leaf. However, the value of tobacco farming is dwarfed by the value of the global tobacco products. Tobacco farming was worth $19.1bn in 2013. Once leaf is manufactured, marketed and branded, tobacco products were worth $783bn the same year.
North Carolina’s farmers employ mostly Latin American workers, who toil in fields owned by white, ageing farmers. The US does not grant agricultural workers collective bargaining rights and workers are sometimes undocumented. Workers are vulnerable to wage theft, exploitation and dangerous working conditions.
Because children work in an informal economy, there is no data on how many might work in fields in summer months, or even when they should be in school. A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) was the first in recent memory to ignite debate about child labor in tobacco in the US. The advocacy group followed up the report in 2015, and found little had fundamentally changed in fields.
“If you appear younger than 16, they’ll ask,” said 19-year-old John about children working on the fields. “But otherwise, no,” they don’t ask. Many contractors, one mother said, encouraged children to lie about their age.
Attempts have been made to regulate tobacco growing in the past. In 2012, the Obama administration attempted to make it illegal for children younger than 16 to work in tobacco. But the Department of Labor backed down after Republicans falsely argued the measure would prevent children from working on family farms.
At the state level, as recently as 2017, the Democratic Virginia delegate Alfonso Lopez tried to introduce a bill to bar child labor on tobacco farms. He was blocked by Republicans.
“If this was your kid, would you be OK with having them work in this job?” Lopez asked at the time as the bill was shelved. “Would you? I don’t think you would. So why is it OK for kids you don’t know to do this job?”
When criticism of child labor on US farms reached its peak in 2014, Philip Morris International hired a company to audit its supply chain. It found children working in hazardous conditions on 16% of the US farms it visited.
However, auditors concluded: “The root cause of many labor related issues in the US is the lack of sustainable, reliable workforce exacerbated by poor US immigration policies.”
The US has signed an international human rights convention meant to protect children “from economic exploitation” and work likely “to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development”. To that end, it encourages trading partners to meet these standards, and publishes an annual report on the “worst forms of child labor” around the world.
One country singled out in the report was Malawi, visited by the Guardian earlier this year as part of an investigation, where children “continue to engage in the worst forms of child labor, including in the harvesting of tobacco”, the most recent report by the US Bureau of International Labor Affairs said.
The tobacco industry, through its Eliminating Child Labor in Tobacco Growing Foundation, agrees “in principle” children should be prohibited from hazardous work, “particularly the use of machinery and agrochemicals by children in tobacco farming”.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is hoping to further deregulate farm labor. Rules put into place after the 2014 HRW report are being rolled back by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which is examining whether children should again be allowed to work with dangerous pesticides on farms.
“I’ve worked in the field as well; it’s very difficult. For a young person it’s worse,” said Antonio’s mother, a 37-year-old with three sons who works behind the counter of a rural convenience store. Teens often prefer farm work to other work, she said, “because they’re given jobs despite their age”.
Dominance of American tobacco has waned in recent decades, as the tobacco supply chain has globalized. This and the deregulation of US tobacco price controls has encouraged consolidation. Where in 1978 there were 188,000 tobacco farms, today there are around 4,200.
“A lot of times they’re underage and they lie and say they’re 16 or 17, but they’re actually 13 or 14 years [old],” Antonio’s mother said. “It’s hard, but there aren’t any more options.” She said claims that child labor was not happening on tobacco farms were “a lie”.
• The names of workers and their families have been changed
In: Finance
1. Broussard Skateboard's sales are expected to increase by 25% from $7.4 million in 2016 to $9.25 million in 2017. Its assets totaled $5 million at the end of 2016. Broussard is already at full capacity, so its assets must grow at the same rate as projected sales. At the end of 2016, current liabilities were $1.4 million, consisting of $450,000 of accounts payable, $500,000 of notes payable, and $450,000 of accruals. The after-tax profit margin is forecasted to be 3%, and the forecasted payout ratio is 70%. What would be the additional funds needed? Do not round intermediate calculations. Round your answer to the nearest dollar.
2. Assume that an otherwise identical firm had $6 million in total assets at the end of 2016. The identical firm's capital intensity ratio (A0*/S0) is (a)(higher than, lower than, or equal to) than Broussard's; therefore, the identical firm is (b)(less, more, the same) capital intensive - it would require (c)(a smaller, a larger, or the same) increase in total assets to support the increase in sales.
In: Finance
Broussard Skateboard's sales are expected to increase by 15% from $8.4 million in 2016 to $9.66 million in 2017. Its assets totaled $3 million at the end of 2016. Broussard is already at full capacity, so its assets must grow at the same rate as projected sales. At the end of 2016, current liabilities were $1.4 million, consisting of $450,000 of accounts payable, $500,000 of notes payable, and $450,000 of accruals. The after-tax profit margin is forecasted to be 3%, and the forecasted payout ratio is 75%. Use the AFN equation to forecast Broussard's additional funds needed for the coming year. Round your answer to the nearest dollar. Do not round intermediate calculations.
In: Finance
Please answer the following problems:
1. SunLife insurance has been trying to penetrate the mass market and educate them on the benefits and importance of life aand other investment insurance. They have used several TV personalities like Charo Santos and Piolo Pascual to penetrarte the segment, with limited success. People are aware of the brand, but are still not taking insurance due to various issues like affordability and distribution. Use the Ansoff Matrix and recommend how they can expand their market with an incremental 5 million heads by penetrating a new customer segment.
2. The milk tea craze is back for the third time around. Even fastfood chains and coffee shops offer milk tea. Taiwan has always been associated with milk tea, so you realized you have a great idea: to launch the Filipino milk tea. Using segmentation strategies, what segment of the market can you go after using that idea, and what will be your marketing mix?
3. WWF has been advocating sustainable development, from protection of wildlife to conservation efforts of our natural resources. While corporate support has been high, individual donors have plunged. People are not aware of where to donate , if at all, they will donate to an advocacy. Using the AIDA communication model, what can you propose to WWF to get 10,000 people to donate 1,000 pesos to the organization.
4. In today’s digital age, what is the fastest way to earn P100,000? Defend your product (or service). Identify your target market and positioning , and how you can mathematically earn (profit, not sales) P100,000. How and where will you market?
In: Finance
Assume that a customer shops at a local grocery store spending an average of $400 a week, resulting in a retailer profit of $40 each week from this customer. Assuming the shopper visits the store all 52 weeks of the year, calculate the customer lifetime value if this shopper remains loyal over a 10-year life span. Also assume a 3 percent annual interest rate and no initial cost to acquire the customer. The customer yields $ nothing per year in profits for this retailer. (Round to the nearest dollar.)
In: Finance
In: Finance
Harry’s Carryout Stores has eight locations. The firm wishes to expand by two more stores and needs a bank loan to do this. Mr. Wilson, the banker, will finance construction if the firm can present an acceptable three-month financial plan for January through March. The following are actual and forecast sales figures:
Actual | Forecast | Additional Information | |||||
November | $360,000 | January | $440,000 | April forecast | $420,000 | ||
December | 380,000 | February | 480,000 | ||||
March | 430,000 | ||||||
Of the firm’s sales, 50 percent are for cash and the remaining 50 percent are on credit. Of credit sales, 50 percent are paid in the month after sale and 50 percent are paid in the second month after the sale. Materials cost 35 percent of sales and are purchased and received each month in an amount sufficient to cover the following month’s expected sales. Materials are paid for in the month after they are received. Labor expense is 45 percent of sales and is paid for in the month of sales. Selling and administrative expense is 10 percent of sales and is paid in the month of sales. Overhead expense is $22,000 in cash per month.
Depreciation expense is $10,800 per month. Taxes of $8,800 will be paid in January, and dividends of $6,000 will be paid in March. Cash at the beginning of January is $96,000, and the minimum desired cash balance is $91,000.
a. Prepare a schedule of monthly cash receipts
for January, February, and March.
b. Prepare a schedule of monthly cash payments
for January, February, and March.
c. Prepare a monthly cash budget with borrowings
and repayments for January, February, and March. (Negative
amounts should be indicated by a minus sign. Assume the January
beginning loan balance is $0.)
PLEASE HELP!
In: Finance
Best Window & Door Corporation is considering the acquisition of Glassmakers Inc. Glassmakers has a capital structure consisting of $5 million (market value) of 11% bonds and $10 million (market value) of common stock. Glassmakers' pre-merger beta is 1.36. Best's beta is 1.02, and both it and Glassmakers face a 40% tax rate. Best's capital structure is 40% debt and 60% equity. The free cash flows from Glassmakers are estimated to be $3.0 million for each of the next 4 years and a horizon value of $10.0 million in Year 4. Tax savings are estimated to be $1 million for each of the next 4 years and a horizon value of $5 million in Year 4. New debt would be issued to finance the acquisition and retire the old debt, and this new debt would have an interest rate of 8%. Currently, the risk-free rate is 6.0% and the market risk premium is 4.0%.
In: Finance
What is the difference between FDIC and SIPC?
In: Finance
Use the following information regarding your retirement planning:
To solve this problem, find the amount that you spend your first year of retirement.
In: Finance
Klingon Widgets, Inc., purchased new cloaking machinery four years ago for $4 million. The machinery can be sold to the Romulans today for $3.6 million. Klingon’s current balance sheet shows net fixed assets of $2 million, current liabilities of $700,000, and net working capital of $216,000. If all the current assets and current liabilities were liquidated today, the company would receive $1.03 million cash.
b. What is the sum of the market value of NWC and the market value of fixed assets? |
|||
In: Finance
An investment is expected to produce the following annual year-end cash flows: year 1: $5,000 year 4: $5,000 year 2: $1,000 year 5: $6,000 year 3: $0 year 6: $863.65 The investment will cost $13,000 today. I got that IRR is 10%
Prove your answer for IRR by showing how much of each year’s cash flow is recovery of the $13,000 investment and how much of the cash flow is return on investment. (Hint: See Exhibit 3–13 and Concept Box 3.2.)
In: Finance
Quantitative Problem: Rosnan Industries' 2014 and 2013 balance sheets and income statements are shown below.
Balance Sheets: | |||
2014 | 2013 | ||
Cash and equivalents | $70 | $55 | |
Accounts receivable | 275 | 300 | |
Inventories | 375 | 350 | |
Total current assets | $720 | $705 | |
Net plant and equipment | 2,000 | 1,490 | |
Total assets | $2,720 | $2,195 | |
Accounts payable | $150 | $85 | |
Accruals | 75 | 50 | |
Notes payable | 120 | 145 | |
Total current liabilities | $345 | $280 | |
Long-term debt | 450 | 290 | |
Common stock | 1,225 | 1,225 | |
Retained earnings | 700 | 400 | |
Total liabilities and equity | $2,720 | $2,195 |
Income Statements: | |||
2014 | 2013 | ||
Sales | $2,000 | $1,500 | |
Operating costs excluding depreciation | 1,250 | 1,000 | |
EBITDA | $750 | $500 | |
Depreciation and amortization | 100 | 75 | |
EBIT | $650 | $425 | |
Interest | 62 | 45 | |
EBT | $588 | $380 | |
Taxes (40%) | 235 | 152 | |
Net income | $353 | $228 | |
Dividends paid | $53 | $48 | |
Addition to retained earnings | $300 | $180 | |
Shares outstanding | 100 | 100 | |
Price | $25.00 | $22.50 | |
WACC | 10.00% |
What is the firm’s 2014 current ratio? Round your answer to two decimal places.
The 2014 current ratio indicates that Rosnan has
sufficient/insufficient current assets to meet its current
obligations as they come due.
What is the firm’s 2014 total assets turnover ratio? Round your
answer to four decimal places.
Given the 2014 current and total assets turnover ratios
calculated above, if Rosnan’s 2014 quick ratio is 1.0 then an
analyst might conclude that Rosnan’s fixed assets are managed
-Select-efficiently/inefficiently
What is the firm’s 2014 debt-to-capital ratio? Round your answer to
two decimal places.
%
If the industry average debt-to-capital ratio is 30%, then
Rosnan’s creditors have a -Select-smaller/bigger cushion than
indicated by the industry average.
What is the firm’s 2014 profit margin? Round your answer to two
decimal places.
%
If the industry average profit margin is 12%, then Rosnan’s
lower than average debt-to-capital ratio might be one reason for
its high profit margin.
-Select-True/FalseCorrect
What is the firm’s 2014 price/earnings ratio? Round your answer to two decimal places.
Using the DuPont equation, what is the firm’s 2014 ROE? Round
your answer to two decimal places.
%
In: Finance