A company acquired with the bank a loan of five million pesos to be paid in 8 years, through equal quarterly payments at the end of each quarter. In the contract it is agreed to pay an interest rate of 24% compounded quarterly for the first 5 years, and 32% compounded quarterly for the remaining 3 years. How do you want to pay off the debt in the fixed date, determine: a) The value of each payment. b) The total finance charge
In: Accounting
At the beginning of the year, Patrick Company acquired a computer to be used in its operations. The computer was delivered by the supplier, installed by Patrick, and placed into operation. The estimated useful life of the computer is five years, and its estimated residual value is significant.
After reading the above prompt, respond to the following:
What costs should Patrick capitalize for the computer?
What is the objective of depreciation accounting?
What is the rationale for using accelerated depreciation methods?
In: Accounting
If you are to be acquired by another company, what will be the least preferred defense maneuver of your choice? Kindly explain the defense you will least likely use and elaborate further why such defense is your least among the choices.
In: Accounting
Question 4
Consider each of the following independent and material situations, identified below (i-vi). In each case:
Required:
If no action is taken by management for each of the events described above (i-v), determine the most appropriate audit opinion to be issued.
In: Accounting
Ivanhoe Company, a machinery dealer, leased a machine to Dexter Corporation on January 1, 2020. The lease is for an 8-year period and requires equal annual payments of $30,992 at the beginning of each year. The first payment is received on January 1, 2020. Ivanhoe had purchased the machine during 2016 for $142,000. Collectibility of lease payments by Ivanhoe is probable. Ivanhoe set the annual rental to ensure a 6% rate of return. The machine has an economic life of 10 years with no residual value and reverts to Ivanhoe at the termination of the lease.
Compute the amount of the lease receivable.
Prepare all necessary journal entries for Ivanhoe for 2020
Suppose the collectibility of the lease payments was not probable for Ivanhoe. Prepare the necessary journal entry for the company in 2020
In: Accounting
IGY is a US manufacturer of many types of high quality products. You are a member of the Accounting Department at IGY, LTD and you have been provided with 2020 budget estimates for Department A.
Your team is responsible to complete the following budgets for Quarter 1 (January, February and March) of 2020:
Sales
Production
Direct Materials
Direct Labor
Manufacturing Overhead
Selling & Administrative
Cash Collections
Cash Disbursements
Cash Budget
Cost of Goods Sold
Income Statement
You will need to complete some budgets for April 2020 to have the information you need for the March 2020 budget. You can make a supplementary schedule next to the budget, but show the work for April in a professional manner.
| Budget Information from Management | |
| Prepare Master Budget for Quarter 1 | |
| Sales Forecast | Units |
| January | 5,000 |
| February | 6,000 |
| March | 7,500 |
| April | 8,000 |
| May | 7,500 |
| Selling price per unit | $ 31.00 |
| Full Product Cost per Unit | $ 21.00 |
| Finished Goods Inventory | |
| Desired Finished Goods Ending Inventory-20 % Following Months Sales | 20% |
| January 1, 2020 Beginning Inventory Finished Goods in Units | 1,700 |
| Raw Materials Cost and Usage | |
| Desired Ending Raw Materials Inventory-50 % Following Months Materials Requirements | 50% |
| January 1,2020 Raw Materials Beginning Inventory- in Units | 4,925 |
| Expected June RM Ending Inventory-in Units | 4,000 |
| RM Cost per pound | $7.25 |
| RM used per unit of product - 2 pounds per unit | 2 |
| Hints: | |
|
1-- You will need April's production needs to complete the March Direct Materials Budget |
|
| Direct Labor Cost | |
| Direct labor per unit (% of hour) | 50% |
| Direct labor hourly rate | $20 |
| Overhead Expense | |
| Variable: Allocated per Direct Labor Hour | 4.20 |
| Fixed monthly overhead- Excluding Depreciation Expense | 20,000 |
| Fixed Overhead - Depreciation Expense | 5,000 |
| Selling Expenses | |
| Sales representative commission (paid in month of sale) | 5% |
| Sales manger's monthly salary | 9,000 |
| Administrative Expenses | |
| Monthly general & adminstrative expenses | 10,000 |
| Monthly interest on long-term note payable | 0.50% |
| Sale of Securities - Plan to sell securities in March | $84,000 |
| Cash Collections | |
| Collected in Month of Sale | 30% |
| Receivables collected in full month following sale | 70% |
| Accounts Recievable Balance January 1, 2020 | $165,000 |
| Cash Disbursements | |
| Raw materials purchased on credit. Paid in full the month following the purchase | 100% |
| Raw materials purchases in December | $98,500 |
| Direct Labor- Paid in the month incurred | 100% |
| Dividends are declared and paid in March | $ 2,500 |
| Tax Payments | |
| The company pays estimated income taxes of $15,500 on the last day of each quarter | $5,500 |
| Capital Purchases | |
| Equipment purchase is budgeted for the last day of March | $7,500 |
| Minimum Cash Balances | |
| Minimum ending cash balance for all months is $50,000. If necessary, the company borrows cash using a short-term line of credit at 1% per month paid at the end of Quarter 2 (June). | |
| Minumum cash balance | 50,000 |
| Monthly interest rate | 1% |
| Beginning Cash Balance on January 1,2020 | 50,000 |
In: Accounting
Q1. Differentiate between Quantitative vs. Qualitative research. Give examples from the articles you have referred in assignment 1
Q2. a. From the the articles you referred in assignment 1 explain one of the quantitative analysis used by the any author. b. Explain, what is ANOVA and Regression Analysis and its use in research
Q3. Bring out the steps in Conducting Experiments and their concerned design
Q4. Explain interview methods and the areas of concern in conducting them
In: Accounting
A. Sell more
B. Sell less.
C. Try to raise prices.
D. Lower the price
In: Economics
Ayayai Corporation is a privately owned company that uses ASPE.
On January 1, 2020 Ayayai’s nancial records indicated the following
information related to the company’s dened benet pension
plan:
Dened Benet Obligation $1,350,000 Pension Plan Assets
1,500,000
Ayayai Corporation’s actuary provided the following information on
December 31, 2020:
Current year service cost $83,000 Prior service cost,
granted Jan 1, 2020 170,000 Employer contributions for
the year 83,000 Benets paid to retirees
25,000 Expected return on assets 5% Actual
return on assets 6% Discount rate 5%
Prepare a pension worksheet for Ayayai Corporation for 2020.
Headings:
Annual Pension Expense Cash
Net Dened Liability/ Asset
Dened Benet Obligation Plan Assets
Balance, January 1, 2020
Data lines under the headings of the form:
Current Service Cost
Past Service Cost
Net Interest/Finance Cost
Asset Remeasurement Gain/Loss
Employer Contributions to Pension Fund
Benets Paid to Retirees from Pension Fund
Pension Expense Entry - 2020
Net Funding Entry
Balance, December 31, 2020
Prepare pension plan journal entries for Ayayai Corporation for
2020. (Credit account titles are automatically indented when the
amount is entered. Do not indent manually. If no entry is required,
select "No entry" for the account titles and enter 0 for the
amounts.)
Account Titles and Explanation Debit Credit
(To record pension expense)
(To record payment to the pension fund)
In: Accounting
Please answer in required words
BAIDU'S BUSINESS MODEL AND ITS EVOLUTION
.
INTRODUCTION
.
In the second quarter of 2016 ended July, Baidu, Inc.
(Baidu), the leading Chinese language Internet search engine,
reported a 34% fall in its quarterly net income — its biggest
quarterly decline since going public in August 2005. The company’s
net income fell to RMB 2.41 billion (US$362 million) in the quarter
from RMB 3.66 billion a year earlier. The poor performance of the
company was attributed to curbs on online advertising in China
following the death of a 21-year-old Chinese student in April 2016
who had tried an experimental cancer therapy advertised on Baidu’s
website. “The challenges Baidu faced in the second quarter served
as a healthy reminder to stay focused on the key drivers of growth,
sustainability and leadership: delivering the best user experience
and staying at the forefront of technology. The implementation of
new regulations and the stricter standards that we proactively
imposed to make our platform more robust will likely suppress
revenue for the next two to three quarters. This period of
uncertainty will pass,” said Robin Li Yanhong (Li), Chairman and
CEO of Baidu.
BACKGROUND NOTE
Baidu was co-founded by Li and his friend Xu in 2000.
In 1991, Li, a native of the Shanxi province of China, went to the
US for higher studies. After completing his studies, he worked with
IDD Information Services between 1994 and 1997, and as a staff
engineer at Infoseek between 1997 and 1999. Right from the
beginning, Li had a passion for Internet-based search and while
working at Infoseek he developed a search mechanism called ‘Link
Analysis’. After this, he was given an assignment to supervise
search engine development. But in 1999, Walt Disney Co. acquired a
stake in Infoseek after which the company’s focus shifted from
search to content. In order to further his interests in search
engines, Li decided to start his own search engine along with Xu, a
Chinese national working in the US, who had a PhD in biochemistry
and good contacts in Silicon Valley.
EXCERPTS
BUSINESS MODEL
Baidu generated revenues mainly from online marketing
services which included pay-for-placement (P4P) services,
performance-based online marketing, and time-based online
advertising services. The company’s P4P Program was one of the core
tenets of its business model.The auction-based P4P platform was an
online marketplace that enabled customers to bid for priority
placement of their links in the search results and reach users who
searched for information related to their products or services.
Baidu was the first auction-based P4P service provider in China.The
P4P model helped Baidu monitor each click, understand the tastes
and preferences of Chinese internet users better, and improve user
experiences in order to drive traffic to its sites.
SECRET OF SUCCESS
Since its inception, Baidu had positioned itself as a
Chinese language search engine which allowed users to find
information, products, and services using Chinese. According to
industry observers, it was a challenging task for Baidu because of
the complexity of the Chinese language. To make search easier for
users, it introduced the ‘pinyin’ search in 2001 that allowed users
to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets when the user
was not sure of a written form of a keyword. This gave relevant
results and made Baidu’s search reliable.
FORAY INTO O2O SERVICES
O2O was one of the fastest growing segments in the
Chinese e-commerce market and was projected to grow at an annual
rate of 25% from US$390 billion in 2014 to US$718 billion in 2017
(See Exhibit IV). A growing population, an increasing number of
internet users, and the rapid shift toward smartphones from
personal computers were driving the O2O trend in China. With the PC
search business maturing and the Chinese economy slowing down, Li
was looking to diversify as he wanted to reduce Baidu’s dependence
on the desktop search business. His goal was to transform Baidu
from connecting people with information to connecting people with
services. He decided to invest in O2O services as he wanted Baidu
to capture a substantial market share in the surging but highly
competitive e-commerce space in China. According to Li, the Chinese
O2O represented a US$1.6 trillion market opportunity.
GLOBAL EXPANSION
Though Baidu was the biggest search engine in China,
its presence outside the country was limited. In 2007, it entered
Japan but eventually succumbed to market pressures and shut down
its Japanese search engine in March 2015. In Japan, Baidu could not
compete against Yahoo and Google and eventually reported losses
that amounted to RMB 260 million in 2010. Despite the setback, Li
said that he wanted Baidu to become a global brand with a presence
in over half the world’s countries. Baidu’s president, Zhang Yaqin
(Yaqin), said the company was targeting emerging markets like
Brazil, Indonesia, and India with their huge populations and
rapidly growing mobile usage so that the company could attract a
new wave of users who were coming online for the first time on
their smartphones. He said that in such markets Baidu planned to
roll out specific products for each country rather than coming out
with a generic, across-the-board service offering. “Baidu has more
than 700 million users abroad, with over 250 million active users
in a month. Over the past three decades, we have virtualized the
physical world, but in the next three decades, we will go the
reverse process, applying the Internet technology and business
model to the physical world,” said Yaqin.
GROWING PAINS
Though Baidu dominated the online search engine market
in China, its reputation was at stake as the company became
involved in some serious medical and healthcare-related scandals in
China. In April 2016, a 21-year-old college student, Wei Zexi
(Wei), died of cancer after reportedly receiving experimental
treatment from a hospital in Beijing that advertised on the Baidu
search engine.
A NEW BUSINESS MODEL
In May 2016, Li announced that Baidu would shift its
business from a search-oriented model to one based on Artificial
Intelligence due to a slowing revenue growth in its core search
business. He said that the shift would allow the company to develop
products in areas such as voice search, automatic translation, and
driverless vehicles. Baidu was exploring a sub-field of artificial
intelligence known as deep learning which aimed to improve search
results by training computers to work more like the human brain. In
September 2016, Baidu launched an artificial system called the
Baidu Brain, featuring state-of-the-art technology for recognizing
and processing speech, images, and words and building user profiles
based on big data analysis. In 2014, Baidu had opened its research
facility on Deep Learning in Silicon Valley and appointed
Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher Andrew Ng as Chief
Scientist of Baidu. Ng was to lead Baidu Research, with labs in
Beijing and Silicon Valley.
CAN BAIDU BOUNCE BACK?
China with about 710 million internet users as of June
2016 was the world’s fastest-growing online market. As of September
2016, Baidu continued to dominate the Chinese search engine market
with a market share of 54.3% followed by Qihoo 360 (29.24%) and
Sogou 14.71%. In the third quarter ended September 2016, Baidu’s
revenues were RMB18.253 billion (US$2.737 billion), a 0.7% decrease
from the corresponding period in 2015. Net income was RMB 3.102
billion (US$465.2 million), a 9.2% increase compared to the
corresponding period of the previous year. Revenue from online
marketing services decreased by 6.7% year on year and 2.6% quarter
on quarter due to a slump in the number of active online marketing
customers.
.
Case Questions:
.
1. Evaluate the business model and
strategy of Baidu and suggest which of the leadership skills
facilitate the team performance and that contributed to its
success. (100 words)
.
2. Illustrate the internal and external
factors of team performance and examine the global expansion
strategy of Baidu. (150 words)
.
3. Identify the need to continuously
reinvent the business model of a company amidst rising competition
and the changes in the business environment. (100 words)
.
4. Explore ways in which Baidu can
overcome the challenges by effective team performance. (100
words)
In: Operations Management