Assume that you are the CEO of a small publicly traded company. The operating performance of your company has fallen below market expectations, which is reflected in a depressed stock price. At your direction, your CFO provides you with the following recommendations that are designed to increase your company’s return on net operating assets (RNOA) and your operating cash flows, both of which will, presumably, result in improved financial performance and an increased stock price. , LO#2.1 #3.1 1. To improved net cash flows from operating activities, the CFO recommends that your company reduce inventories (raw material, work-in-process, and finished goods) and receivables (through selective credit granting and increased emphasis on collection of past-due accounts). 2. The CFO recommends that your company sell and lease back its office building. The lease will be structure so as to be classified as an operating lease under GAAP. The assets will, therefore, not be iincluded in the computation of the net ooperating assets (NOA), thus increasing RNOA. Evaluate each of the CFO recommendations. In your evaluation consider whether the recommendation will positively impact the operating pperformance of your company or whether it is cosmetic in nature.

You are the CEO of a large battery company that has a long and famous history in the design, manufacture, and distribution of different types of batteries that are used in a growing variety of industries. Your company is organized into two strategic business units.
One business unit (Business Unit 1) specializes in high-end batteries for critical systems. Some of your best known batteries are used to power cardiac pacemakers (heart implants), kidney dialysis systems, portable diabetes treatment systems, and even space-based life support systems (electronic monitors). Many of these batteries incorporate the use of highly exotic, rare-earth materials whose specific compounds and mixtures are highly proprietary to your company. Your patents (as well as your distinctive way of experimenting with materials) have pretty much given you a lock on this part of the business. These exotic batteries represent the highest form of technology development and refinement that your competitors respect and consider as beyond cutting-edge science. Several executives from the automotive industry have commented that these advanced batteries will do much to boost electric-powered vehicles in the near future, but only if you can scale the business and drive down unit production costs. As such, it has been difficult for other battery companies to imitate what you are doing. As a constant worrier, you feel that your competitive advantage lead-time, while impressive, seems shorter than you would like. Your R&D skills and depth are excellent, but you feel as if your manufacturing process is
missing something, since you have typically experienced a long glide-path in reducing your unit costs with every new battery size.
The other business unit (Business Unit 2) is better known for its well-recognized battery brands that used in long-lasting, conventional lithium-ion and alkaline batteries for a broad range or devices, including watches, cell phones, and even laptop computers. Customers love your batteries because of their long-lasting qualities, but they pay a price premium for your offerings. Unlike that of some of your competitors, your lithium batteries are high-quality and do not pose the same degree of fire hazard in laptop computers and smartphones. The extra safety feature is a tribute to your company’s high ethical standards in development and manufacturing, but it also means that your unit costs will probably remain higher than that of rivals. However, Business Unit 2 is beginning to face growing competitive pressures from other manufacturers who are seeking to erode your sizable market share. You are not excessively worried about your competitors yet, but you realize that the battery industry has become significantly more capital-intensive over the years. Business Unit 2 has significant brand equity that captures much customer loyalty, but here too, you begin to wonder how long you can keep charging a price premium for lithium batteries – especially given the rise of new, ultra-modern manufacturing facilities in the Far East that compete on scale and volume.
A year later, your company has been approached by a smaller battery company (call it X) based in Asia. They approach you with an informal request to begin investigating the possibility of working together on advanced battery technologies. Although you have heard about the company from attending industry conferences in the recent past, you never thought that X was a serious player in the battery or power systems business. Most of the business for X has traditionally come from making standard alkaline batteries that are included in remote controls for television sets, telephone answering machines, small portable electric fans, low-end digital cameras, and other low-cost, mass-produced consumer electronics products. Since X makes standard alkaline batteries for other manufacturers, they really have no brand equity at all, as they have never sold directly to consumers. On the other hand, X just recently completed building a large battery manufacturing facility that is designed to provide a wide range of low-cost batteries to all types of consumer electronics companies. From what you hear at industry conferences, X hopes to serve not only its traditional corporate customer base (portable television manufacturers, phone manufacturers, and digital cameras), but also companies that make high-end digital watches, laptop computers, tablets, and portable DVD players used in long airline flights. X has said nothing about what its new manufacturing facility can do, but there is strong reason to believe that X has the talent and the machinery in place to produce both alkaline and lithium-based batteries. Even more uncertain is how well X can formulate the necessary chemical compounds and mixtures that are needed to produce the right balance of smooth, sustained power flow for long-lasting but stable battery life for higher-end products. Little is known about X’s manufacturing skills as it relates to quality control and battery safety features either. Yet, X is determined to push ahead since it wants to become the battery source to all kinds of businesses. Since most consumer electronics companies are outsourcing non-core operations to improve their own internal measures of financial efficiency, many of them have decided to use X’s batteries rather than to make them on their own. You have also heard rumors that management at X is also anxious to expand beyond the alkaline and lithium business segments to move up the power systems food chain. X’s young CEO even drives a prototype
electric vehicle made by Tesla, but claims that on some day, at some point, he/she could beat Tesla in its own game. Because you have some lingering doubts about the depth and sophistication of X’s management team and technology, you politely decline the opportunity to work with X.
Six months have passed, and you are invited to lunch by a friend and former executive who now works at a medical device electronics firm (call them MECO) that builds external portable diabetes monitoring systems and external portable cardiac defibrillators, as well as high-end implantable cardiac pacemaker devices that are installed in the patient by hospitals and doctors. MECO’s external, portable medical products are designed and sold for the consumer market, not for hospitals or long-stay medical facilities. They are particularly well-suited for consumers who are caring for loved ones in the home, where portable medical devices may be needed as a stopgap measure before emergency help or professional help arrives. (Think portable defibrillators that should be in every section of a high-end steakhouse restaurant!) At the lunch meeting, MECO is interested in purchasing large quantities of your most advanced, proprietary, exotic-material batteries for use in their newly designed, implantable cardiac pacemakers. Having worked for you a long time, your friend knows that you have the best scientific reputation and skills in batteries to back up your products. As the conversation lingers, he/she also tells you that MECO has dramatically improved its power system efficiency and maintenance costs for its external portable defibrillators several quarters ahead of schedule. You asked how they were able to accomplish this, since working with portable medical technology requires a different set of manufacturing skills (e.g., lower cost, long production runs, specialized proprietary techniques) than those used for implantable cardiac products made for use in hospitals (e.g., small-quantity, custom-order, but higher unit-cost production). He/she responds by saying that MECO has contracted out most of their battery manufacturing to a company called X, and that they were instrumental in helping us figure out how to best manage power consumption and drainage issues in electronic devices.
Your friend tells you the following: The alliance is structured in a serial manner whereby X initially provides the battery, and MECO does the rest. Increasingly intrigued and simultaneously perturbed by what you hear, you ask for some more specifics about what this relationship is all about. He/she tells you it works like this: You concentrate your effort on designing the latest medical device technology and focusing all of your efforts on making sure that it can work in a variety of different environments (e.g., climates, temperature, altitude, humidity). Once you have finalized a robust portable defibrillator design, you provide it to X, who in turn manufactures the batteries according to the size, weight, and how long you want the defibrillator to keep running. He/she has visited X’s battery manufacturing facility, and tells you how marveled he/she was: “These people are able to run such a tight ship – their cost management and yield improvement skills are top-notch. The batteries come out perfect without any seams, leaks, dents, or irregularities on the surface. Yet it is difficult to isolate which department within X is responsible for which activity it does. The external coating of the batteries can take a beating. It’s almost like they can coax more out of their equipment without compromising quality. We could not attain the same kinds of battery durability and sustainability in our own factory. It seems like everything related to quality in their facilities is so seamless or interconnected that it is difficult to know where one set of competences end and another begins. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s not obvious that we could duplicate it on our own.” X ships
the batteries directly to you, and is even willing, for an added fee, to build the surrounding surge protectors, voltage regulators, transformers, and a few other components that are integrated with the portable defibrillator’s power system to complete a good deal of the end product. What X cannot do is to design the actual microprocessor “brain” that controls how all of these components are integrated together in the actual medical device.

You have decided to investigate the possibility of working with X on a limited project in the battery field. You think a joint venture would work best with X, and you are willing to contribute management and technical oversight from Business Unit 2. You want to begin working together on a battery that is already mature (for reasons of simplicity, assume it is a lithium-ion battery used for watches and cell phones). In your initial negotiations with X, you propose that they contribute funds to the joint venture that would house a jointly-owned plant in the U.S. so that you don’t have to wait for the battery to be produced and shipped from X’s far-away Asian factory. The negotiating team from X looks at you in a funny way, but in turn, proposes its own counter-offer. X does not want to build a battery factory in the U.S., but in turn has proposed to work with you on a more advanced line of batteries – some of which use exotic, rare earth materials in the core. According to X’s management, they prefer an alliance vehicle “that is not so elaborate and formal like a joint venture.” In fact, they would prefer something along the line of a co-development pact. Keeping your answer short, what would be some of the important points of negotiating with X? What are some key issues that you need to consider? How would you frame them in your proposal? What are some key issues that X is probably considering? How will these issues show up in X’s proposals? (Provide your answer and supporting rationale in a table for both companies using short bullet points.

A. Project 1 case: DDL’s and Business Rules - The SQL queries for this project are based on the business rules from PROJECT 1. Thus, the SQL queries will run against the tables from Project 1 (see section B below). The following is a list of the business rules derived from the Project 1 assignment:

- A university is identified by its name and located in a particular city.

- A university has many researchers, each of whom can only be associated with only one university.

- A researcher is identified by an identification number, and has a name, phone, and email address.

- A researcher can attend many conferences.

- A conference is identified by an identification number; it also has a name, a location, and a date.

- For each conference, a researcher may or may not present a scientific research paper.

- For each conference, one university is in-charge of its logistic, while another university is in-charge of its marketing.

- A university can be involved in either role with any conference.

B. Run the following DDL’s and add your own data rows to the tables

CREATE TABLE `university` (

`UNIVERSITY_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,

`UNIVERSITY_NAME` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`UNIVERSITY_CITY` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`UNIVERSITY_STATE` varchar(2) DEFAULT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`UNIVERSITY_ID`)

) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE `conference` (

`CONFERENCE_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,

`CONFERENCE_NAME` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`CONFERENCE_CITY` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`CONFERENCE_DATE` date DEFAULT NULL,

`UNIVERSITY_ID_LOGISTICS` int(11) NOT NULL,

`UNIVERSITY_ID_MARKETING` int(11) NOT NULL,

`CONFERENCE_STATE` varchar(2) DEFAULT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`CONFERENCE_ID`,`UNIVERSITY_ID_LOGISTICS`,`UNIVERSITY_ID_MARKETING`),

KEY `fk_CONFERENCE_UNIVERSITY1_idx` (`UNIVERSITY_ID_LOGISTICS`),

KEY `fk_CONFERENCE_UNIVERSITY2_idx` (`UNIVERSITY_ID_MARKETING`),

CONSTRAINT `fk_CONFERENCE_UNIVERSITY1` FOREIGN KEY (`UNIVERSITY_ID_LOGISTICS`) REFERENCES `university` (`UNIVERSITY_ID`) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION,

CONSTRAINT `fk_CONFERENCE_UNIVERSITY2` FOREIGN KEY (`UNIVERSITY_ID_MARKETING`) REFERENCES `university` (`UNIVERSITY_ID`) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION

) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE `researcher` (

`researcher_id` int(11) NOT NULL,

`res_lname` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`res_fname` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`res_title` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,

`university_UNIVERSITY_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`researcher_id`,`university_UNIVERSITY_ID`),

KEY `fk_researcher_university1_idx` (`university_UNIVERSITY_ID`),

CONSTRAINT `fk_researcher_university1` FOREIGN KEY (`university_UNIVERSITY_ID`) REFERENCES `university` (`UNIVERSITY_ID`) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION

) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE `conference_has_researcher` (

`CONFERENCE_CONFERENCE_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,

`RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY (`CONFERENCE_CONFERENCE_ID`,`RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER_ID`),

KEY `fk_CONFERENCE_has_RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER1_idx` (`RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER_ID`),

KEY `fk_CONFERENCE_has_RESEARCHER_CONFERENCE_idx` (`CONFERENCE_CONFERENCE_ID`),

CONSTRAINT `fk_CONFERENCE_has_RESEARCHER_CONFERENCE` FOREIGN KEY (`CONFERENCE_CONFERENCE_ID`) REFERENCES `conference` (`CONFERENCE_ID`) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION,

CONSTRAINT `fk_CONFERENCE_has_RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER1` FOREIGN KEY (`RESEARCHER_RESEARCHER_ID`) REFERENCES `researcher` (`researcher_id`) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION

) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

C. Data Queries   “Good questions to ask of your data” – The business rules from section A above were used to derive the following 10 query descriptions below. Read each description and write the equivalent SQL query.

1. List the universities sorted by city.

2. List the Researchers sorted by last name.

3. List the researchers and their corresponding universities sorted by the university city. You must use an INNER JOIN with RESEARCHER and UNIVERSITY tables.

4. List the university and “count” of researchers at each university sorted by the university name.

You CANNOT use an inner join. You must use a subquery with RESEARCHER.

5. List the university and “count” of researchers at each university where there is more than 1 researcher. Also, sort this query by the university name. You must user an INNER JOIN (NOT A SUBQUERY)

6. List all conferences in the state of georgia. Include the city and state with the query.

7. List the conference and researcher count for conferences in georgia. You CANNOT use an inner join. You must use “two” subqueries that are nested.

8. List the researcher, university and conferences where the conference is in California. You must user an INNER JOIN (NOT A SUBQUERY).

9. List the university and count of researchers that are planning to present at a conference in 2021. You CANNOT use an inner join. You must use a subquery.

10. List the Universities in the database table. If the university appears in a conference that is in charge of its marketing. Each university can only be listed once. You must user an OUTER JOIN (NO INNER JOIN OR SUBQUERY).

I have part A completed. I am stuck on part C mostly, but help on part B would be greatly appreciated.

Direct foreign investment by China in other countries expanded rapidly for 10 years from 2007, but fell significantly in 2017. Discuss the reasons for the decline in 2017. Did the decline continue or was 2017 just a temporary downturn? From a Chinese perspective, what are the pros and cons of outbound DFI. Consider the acquisition in 2016 of GE Appliances acquired by Haier, a Chinese company. What are the advantages/disadvantages to both China and the U.S.? Has China invested in the United states and what type of investment?

welcome and introduction question for the interview of nurses

briefly explain five importance of interview

Bruno Corporation is authorized to 20,000 shares of 6%, $100 par, cumulative, convertible preferred stock and 100,000 shares, $10 par value common stock. Bruno has outstanding 6,000 shares of preferred stock and 40,000 shares of common stock on the December 31, 2019 balance sheet. The following are selected transactions that occurred in 2020:

1. Bruno Corporation owes shares of Naple Corporation. At December 31, 2019, the securities were carried in Bruno’s accounting records at the cost of $875,000 which equaled the fair value. On April 1, when the fair of the securities was $990,000, Bruno declared a property dividend whereby the Naple securities are to be distributed on April 29, 2020 to common stockholders of record on April 15, 2020.

2. Acquired land by issuing 640 shares of preferred stock and 1,000 shares of common stock. The preferred and common stock are selling at $113 and $36 per share, respectively. The land was appraised at $112,000.

3. Bruno issued 3,000 shares of common stock and 1,000 shares of preferred stock for a lump sum of $220,000. The market price of the common stock was $38 and the preferred, $118.

4. Preferred shareholders, who originally paid the corporation $110 per share their stock converted 5,000 shares into common stock. Each preferred share is convertible into 3 shares of common stock. The current market price of the preferred stock and the common stock is $120 and $41 per share, respectively.

5. The company purchased 4,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $40 per share to be held in treasury. The company uses the cost method.

6. The company sold 500 shares of its common treasury stock for $42 per share.

7. The company sold 1,000 shares of its common treasury stock for $37 per share.

8. The board of directors declared a cash dividend for the year. The preferred and common shares outstanding on this date were 2,640 and 41,500 respectively. The common stock dividend was $2 per share. When you make this entry show separate liabilities for the preferred and common stock dividends.

Instructions: Prepare the journal entries to record the above events. *****Be sure to show calculations and note any assumptions when completing the entry.

Lexington Company engaged in the following transactions during Year 1, its first year in operation: (Assume all transactions are cash transactions)Acquired $6,000 cash from issuing common stock.Borrowed $4,400 from a bank.Earned $6,200 of revenues.Incurred $4,800 in expenses.Paid dividends of $800.
Lexington Company engaged in the following transactions during Year 2: (Assume all transactions are cash transactions)Acquired an additional $1,000 cash from the issue of common stock.Repaid $2,600 of its debt to the bank.Earned revenues, $9,000.Incurred expenses of $5,500.Paid dividends of $1,280.

25.1)      What was the net cash flow from financing activities reported on Lexington's statement of cash flows for Year 2?

A)    $1,000 outflow.  
   B)    $2,880 outflow.
   C)    $1,000 inflow.
   D)    $2,880 inflow.
  

25.2)      What is the amount of total assets that will be reported on Lexington's balance sheet at the end of Year 1?

   A)    $12,000  
   B)    $11,000
   C)    $1,600
   D)    $7,600
  

25.3)      What was the amount of retained earnings that will be reported on Lexington's balance sheet at the end of Year 1?

   A)    $6,200    
   B)    $1,400
   C)    $600
   D)    $5,400
  

25.4)      What was the amount of liabilities on Lexington's balance sheet at the end of Year 2?

   A)    $480.      
   B)    $1,800.
   C)    $1,000.
   D)    ($2,600).