Question

Profile a Company. To get started decide on a company to investigate in and a company in the same industry to compare against your investment company. For instance, if you were to invest in Home Depot, Lowes would be a good comparison company.   

Answer 1

Home depot is a good company to invest as it has a good growth rate in its sales and customer satisfaction. To compare with Lowes, in quarter 2, 2011 Home Depot reported 4.2% in overall sales growth while Lowes reports 1.3% growth in overall sales.

As per the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Home Depot registered a neck to neck customer satisfaction compared with Lowes since 2001. It giving tough competition to Lowes in terms of customers satisfaction. However customer are preferred more to Lowes as 46% compare to Home Depot 34% as per August 2011 study.

At Home Depot, stores and customer are positioned at the top, while senior management is at the bottom. Everything in the company, from senior management to corporate support systems, is designed to support and enable the success of associates and customers.

The strength of preference between the two retailers, however changed significantly from 2007 and 2011. Of those cross shoppers who preferred the home depot, 53% preferred the retailer a lot more and 6% preferred the retailer somewhat more than Lowes. This represent a considerable improvement from 2007 results. In 2007, 24% preferred the Home Depot a lot more and 50% preferred it somewhat more. Compared with the results for Lowes, only 11% preferred Lowes a lot more and 47% preferred the retailer somewhat more than the Home Depot in the 2011 study. The result for Lowes notably different from those reported in the previous study. In 2007, 39% preferred Lowes a lot more and 42% preferred the retailer somewhat more than the Home Depot.

The Home Depot’s focus on improving the shopping experience also paid off in terms of several important customer purchasing metrics and financial results. However, the Home Depot still had a lot to improve.