1)calculate CCC for Puma and UA.

2)pick any 1 company of the 4:

how its operational liquidity stands versus competitors (other 3 firms)?

how can this company improve its liquidity? What are possible risks/limitations to your proposed changes?

Break-Even Sales: Sales for Target Profit Health-Temp Company is a placement agency for temporary nurses. It serves hospitals and clinics throughout the metropolitan area. Health-Temp Company believes it will place temporary nurses for a total of 23,500 hours next year. Health-Temp charges the hospitals and clinics $90 per hour and has variable costs of $75.60 per hour (this includes the payment to the nurse). Total fixed costs equal $321,000.

Required:

1. Calculate the contribution margin per unit and the contribution margin ratio.

2. Calculate the sales revenue needed to break even.

3. Calculate the sales revenue needed to achieve a target profit of $100,000.

4. What if Health-Temp had target operating income (profit) of $110,000? Would sales revenue be larger or smaller than the one calculated in Requirement 3? Why? By how much?

Show computation please.

Laundry detergent and bags of ice—products of industries that seem pretty mundane, maybe even boring. Hardly! Both have been the center of clandestine meetings and secret deals worthy of a spy novel. In France, between 1997 and 2004, the top four laundry detergent producers (Proctor & Gamble, Henkel, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive) controlled about 90 percent of the French soap market. Officials from the soap firms were meeting secretly, in out-of-the-way, small cafés around Paris. Their goals: Stamp out competition and set prices.

Around the same time, the top five Midwest ice makers (Home City Ice, Lang Ice, Tinley Ice, Sisler’s Dairy, and Products of Ohio) had similar goals in mind when they secretly agreed to divide up the bagged ice market.

If both groups could meet their goals, it would enable each to act as though they were a single firm—in essence, a monopoly—and enjoy monopoly-size profits. The problem? In many parts of the world, including the European Union and the United States, it is illegal for firms to divide up markets and set prices collaboratively.

These two cases provide examples of markets that are characterized neither as perfect competition nor monopoly. Instead, these firms are competing in market structures that lie between the extremes of monopoly and perfect competition. Discuss the market conditions based on the above scenario.

Q2. It’s no secret that small businesses play a vital role in the US economy. However, most non-employer small businesses average just $44,000 a year in annual revenue, with many of these companies earning $25,000 or less. While various factors can affect a business’ revenue potential, one of the most important is the pricing strategy utilized by its owners.

Good pricing strategy helps you determine the price point at which you can maximize profits on sales of your products or services. When setting prices, a business owner needs to consider a wide range of factors including production and distribution costs, competitor offerings, positioning strategies and the business’ target customer base.

While customers won’t purchase goods that are priced too high, your company won’t succeed if it prices goods too low to cover all of the business’ costs. Along with product, place and promotion, price can have a profound effect on the success of your small business.

Here are some of the various strategies that businesses implement when setting prices on their products and services. Analyze pricing strategies.

Boatbound

Serial entrepreneur Aaron Hall took note of the “sharing economy” that emerged during the last recession and launched Boatbound, a peer-to-peer boat rental company that brings together boat owners who are willing to rent their boats when they are not in use and people who want a fun boating experience without the cost of owning a boat. Hall realized that 12.2 million boats are registered in the United States, yet the average owner uses his or her boat just 26 days per year. Boatbound screens all potential renters, verifies the condition and the safety of each boat, carries ample insurance on each boat, and covers general liability. Boat owners select their renters from Boatbound’s pool of applicants and set daily rental fees, and Boatbound collects 35 percent of the fee. Boatbound has rented every kind of boat, from kayaks to yachts with captains. Fees range from $200 to $8,500 per day. “As a boat owner and someone in the marine industry, I’ve been waiting for something like this my whole life,” says Aabad Melwani, owner of a marina. “I just didn’t know it.”

Henrybuilt

Scott Hudson, CEO of Henrybuilt, had created a profitable niche designing and building upscale kitchens that ranged from $30,000 to $100,000. In 2006, Hudson opened a New York City showroom, which doubled in size in just 18 months. By 2008, the company had more than 200 jobs in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. When the recession hit, however, new projects came to a standstill, and customers began cancelling orders. In response, Hudson launched a subsidiary, Viola Park Corporation, that provides customers lower-cost remodeling options that use its software rather than an architect to create “custom” variations on Henrybuilt designs. The result is a process that produces a kitchen much faster and at half the cost of a Henrybuilt kitchen. Henrybuilt sales have recovered, but Viola Park accounts for 20 percent of sales and is growing twice as fast as Henrybuilt. Unequal Technologies Robert Vito started Unequal Technologies in 2008 to supply protective clothing and gear, including bullet-proof vests, to military contractors. The protective gear is made from a lightweight yet strong composite material that he developed and patented. Two years later, the equipment manager of the Philadelphia Eagles called to ask whether Unequal Technologies could create a special garment for one of its star players who had suffered a sternum injury. Vito modified the bullet-proof vest for the player and soon had other players in the National Football League asking for protective gear. Unequal technologies went on to develop Concussion Reduction Technology (CRT), peel-and-stick pads for football helmets that are made from before it reaches the skull. Independent tests show that CRT reduces the risk of head injuries from impact by 53 percent. The company now supplies equipment to 27 of the NFL’s 32 teams and has its sights set on an even larger market: amateur sports. Vito says Unequal’s technology gives the company a competitive edge that has allowed it to increase sales from $1 million to $20 million in just one year.

(Source: Scarborough and Cornwall, 2016)

1. Select one of these small businesses (Boatbound or Henrybuilt) and explain how the said business used six (6) of the 10 types of innovation to bolster its success.   

15. Marks)

Construct a 93% confidence interval for the sample labelled “problem 3” in the data sheet. What is the probability that the population mean might be outside the interval?

A population of values has a normal distribution with μ = 110.6 μ = 110.6 and σ = 74 σ = 74 . You intend to draw a random sample of size n = 157 n = 157 . Find P68, which is the score separating the bottom 68% scores from the top 32% scores. P68 (for single values) = Find P68, which is the mean separating the bottom 68% means from the top 32% means. P68 (for sample means) = Enter your answers as numbers accurate to 1 decimal place. Answers obtained using exact z-scores or z-scores rounded to 3 decimal places are accepted.

In 2006, the five leading suppliers of digital cameras in the United States were: Canon, Sony, Kodak, Olympus, and Samsung. The combined market share of these five firms was 60.9 percent. The leading firm was Canon, with a market share of 18.7 percent. The own-price elasticity for Canon’s cameras was -4.0 and the market elasticity of demand was -1.6. Suppose that in 2006, the average retail price of a Canon digital camera was $240 and that Canon’s marginal cost was $180 per camera.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Is the market for digital cameras concentrated?
2. What is the Rothschild index for Cannon? How would you interpret the Rothschild index you get?
3. What is the Lerner index for Cannon? How would you interpret the Lerner index you get?
4. Based on the information given in Question 1-3, what type of market structures (Perfect competition, Monopoly, monopolistic competition, or oligopoly) does these suggest? Why?

Q3: Pharmaceutical industry firms have been trying to counter the changes below through M&A and strategic alliance activity. Please categorize them according to Porter’s Five Forces.

Porter’s Five Forces:
-Threat of substitutes (SUBST)
-Threat of new entrants (NEWE)
-Threats of supplier leverage (SUPPL)
-Threat of buyer leverage (BUYER)
-Threat of rivalry (RIVAL)

Adapted from Schon, H. 2015. Pharmaceuticals M&A versus alliances and its underlying value drivers.
1. ________ Government austerity measures like the 2010 Affordable Care Act have lowered prices.
2. ________ Generics constituted 22% of pharmaceutical sales in 2006, 40% in 2016.
3. ________ Biologics (biotechnology) accounted for 16% of pharmaceutical sales in 2006, 22% in 2016.
4. ________ R&D productivity in terms of new FDA-approved small and large molecules has remained essentially unchanged since 1998, perhaps contributing to slowing industry sales at large firms.

1. Will China maintain its strong economic growth in the years to come? Some suggest it will until 2050. what do you think?

2.If China will go from 17 million to 190 million middle-income people by the year 2020, would the scenario presented Best buy in 2006 not be applicable anymore? That is, the culture shock in 2006 was that the Chinese would not pay for Best Buy's overly expensive products unless they are a brand like Apple. Would newly rich Chinese customer engage in this purchasing by 2020?

3.With Alibaba's ownership of the very popular TaoBao online shopping system(similar to ebay and amazon) and its spread across the world, will a Western-based online shopping culture ultimately infiltrate China?

Refer http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/people-s-republic-china-opened-foreign-direct-investments-fd-chapter-4-problem-3cdq-solution-9781259686696-exc