Let us consider the case of John, an entrepreneur and the CEO of a startup, named “Home Service”. The company started a small scale service where a couple of signed-up workers of the company were giving various services to the dweller of Ballarat, a city in Victoria. The services include plumbing, electric works, gas appliances’ works, and car wash. The people are Ballarat dwellers (roughly 20k in total) needed to download the software from App Store/Google Store and try to find someone in Ballarat who can provide the required service. They post a job in the app with estimated pricing, and then the interested workers pick the task. Then they go after a couple of rounds of message exchange through the app to understand the weight of the work and they finalize the total costing for that. The app then takes a service charge for the task, while the workers receive the remaining money. The business got tremendous popularity among the inhabitant of the city while people from other cities were also looking for services. Currently, John’s system is receiving around 10 requests per hour for various services.
As mentioned above, due to selecting only one city and a fixed number of services, John’s current system is like a simple computer where he deployed all his codes. To be more specific, the webserver, backend API codes, and a database server are installed in one virtual machine (VM) in the cloud, while the mobile apps are deployed in the Apple store and Google store.
John has decided to extend his business by outspreading the service area to all over Australians and to incorporate more services like catering, food delivery, carpet cleaning, gardening, and many more. To incorporate the above requirements, John’s current platform (i.e., one VM with everything installed in that VM) is not capable of meeting the future requirements.
You are hired by John to extend his current platform to a distributed system so that your proposed system will be capable to deal with millions of users, thousands of workers, hundreds of services, and thousands of requests per hour to the system.
You have to propose a new distributed system so that it can cope with future demand. You are not required to draw any diagram, rather you should mention how many (roughly) new VM, Database servers/Web servers are required to deploy. Most importantly, you have to discuss thoroughly how your PROPOSED system takes the advantages of a distributed system (i.e., Resource sharing, sharing of hardware and software, Openness, Concurrency, Scalability, Fault tolerance, Transparency).
In: Computer Science
WRITTEN INTERVIEW QUESTIONS DOCTORAL CANDIDATES SHOULD PROVIDE
AN AUTHENTIC PERSONAL STATEMENT TO EACH OF THE FIVE FOLLOWING
QUESTIONS/PROMPTS REFLECTING ON THEIR INTERESTS. IN THE EVENT THAT
ANY OUT
WRITTEN INTERVIEW QUESTIONSDOCTORAL CANDIDATES SHOULD PROVIDE AN
AUTHENTIC PERSONAL STATEMENT TO EACH OF THE FIVE FOLLOWING
QUESTIONS/PROMPTS REFLECTING ON THEIR INTERESTS. IN THE EVENT THAT
ANY OUTSIDE RESOURCES ARE USED, RESOURCES SHOULD BE CITED IN APA
FORMAT. SUBMISSIONS SHOULD BE A MAXIMUM OF 500 WORDS OR 125 WORDS
PER QUESTION/PROMPT. IT IS BEST TO RESPOND TO EACH PROMPT/QUESTION
INDIVIDUALLY FOR CLARITY OF THE REVIEWER. WRITING SAMPLES SHOULD BE
SUBMITTED IN MICROSOFT WORD FORMAT AND INCLUDE THE CANDIDATE’S
NAME.
1. PROVIDE A BRIEF INTRODUCTION FOCUSING ON YOUR EDUCATION, CAREER, AND DECISION TO APPLY TO UNIVERSITY OF THE CUMBERLANDS.2. IN RELATION TO YOUR DOCTORAL PROGRAM APPLICATION, WHAT AREA OF RECENT RESEARCH IN THE FIELD WOULD YOU WANT TO STUDY, AND WHY?3. HOW DOES YOUR CURRENT VOCATION RELATE TO YOUR APPLICATION TO THE DOCTORAL PROGRAM?4. HOW WILL YOUR EXPERIENCES AND PERSONAL SKILLS HELP YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN YOUR PROGRAM?5. WHAT LONG-TERM GOALS DO YOU HAVE FOR APPLYING YOUR LEARNING FROM YOUR DOCTORAL PROGRAM?
In: Operations Management
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For months, Daniel Zhang huddled with a small team in an underground garage in Shanghai. The chief executive of Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. was working on a secret plan that would sound crazy even to many of his own colleagues 100 miles away in Hangzhou. Zhang wanted to launch a startup inside the e-commerce giant that would combine a grocery store, a restaurant, and a delivery app, using robotics and facial recognition to speed up logistics and payment. That project, Freshippo, has since become a major part of Zhang’s blueprint for Alibaba’s future, with 150 stores (and counting) across 17 Chinese cities. On a recent weekday afternoon at a store in Hangzhou, plastic bins shuttle automatically along tracks in the ceiling, collecting goods from around the store for online orders. Deliverymen stand by to transport the goods anywhere within a 1.9-mile radius in as little as 30 minutes. Zhang is the little-known 47-year-old with the unenviable task of stepping into the shoes of China’s most famous businessman. On Sept. 10 he’ll add the title of chairman of Alibaba after assuming the CEO role in 2015, and he’ll be the first person since co-founder Jack Ma to hold both positions at the same time. Ma is a global figure known for hobnobbing with heads of state and for his fiery speeches at gatherings such as the World Economic Forum. Zhang is slight and soft-spoken, often proceeding haltingly in English during calls |
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with investors. Even in China, he’s largely unknown. At Alibaba headquarters, an employee’s parent mistook him for the janitor. Yet in his understated way, Zhang is proving as radical as his predecessor. He says Alibaba is uniquely positioned to pull together the online and offline worlds in groceries and beyond, and dozens of his new initiatives are leading Alibaba deeper into fields including finance, health care, movies, and music. Especially in the U.S., where the company’s shares trade, these efforts have baffled some investors, who worry about overreach. In Zhang’s view, they’re a matter of survival. “Every business has a life cycle,” he says during an exclusive interview at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters. “If we don’t kill our existing business, someone else will. So I’d rather see our own new businesses kill our existing business.” |
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Alibaba’s online marketplace made it China’s largest public company, with a market value of about $460 billion, but recent months have provided several signs of strain. China’s economic growth is slowing, squeezing consumer spending and advertising. Investors have pushed down the company’s share price. And protests in Hong Kong forced the delay of a stock offering that could have raised $20 billion. “He’s got to find new seeds for revenue growth,” says Mitchell Green, managing partner of Alibaba investor Lead Edge Capital. “He’s planting a lot of seeds.” Born and raised in Shanghai, Zhang followed the path of his accountant father to Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Early in his career, he saw up close how quickly established institutions can vanish. He was interviewing at Barings Bank when one trader lost more than $1 billion and took the 233-year-old institution under. Instead, he became an auditor at the Chinese affiliate of Arthur Andersen, and was working in the satellite office when Andersen went down in connection with the Enron accounting-fraud scandal. “This is a very funny story,” he says, with the comic timing of a man who loves bookkeeping jokes. “After I joined Arthur Andersen, I had a joke with him. I said, ‘For many years, you didn’t want me to be an accountant. |
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Then I became an auditor.’ I was never an accountant for even one day.” Zhang later became chief financial officer at game developer Shanda Interactive, at the time the largest internet company in China. That’s where Alibaba Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai, the next-most influential co- founder after Ma, found Zhang in 2007. “Daniel really understands business,” says Tsai, who recently plunked down $3.5 billion, about a third of his wealth, to buy control of the Brooklyn Nets. “You can’t disrupt unless you really understand what you’re trying to disrupt.” It was at Alibaba that Zhang truly distinguished himself. When he joined, the company’s hottest website was Taobao, an EBay lookalike that was losing money and full of phony goods. “When I looked at the financial statement, oh Jesus,” Zhang says. “Revenue? Zero. Bottom line? A lot of losses. Then I moved to the balance sheet, even worse.” Starting in 2008, Zhang took over the development of Tmall, an online marketplace more like Amazon.com Inc.’s that’s now Alibaba’s most lucrative operation. To attract brand names to the site, he furnished top merchants with new levels of information on their customers: who was buying what, where they lived, which kinds of ads worked best. Sales boomed, and Zhang slowly coaxed global brands such as Procter & Gamble Co.’s Tide and SK-II into selling online in China. He showed Alibaba was serious about fighting fakes by installing software to detect copycats, and by giving companies a hotline to report violations. P&G estimates that only about 1% of goods carrying its brands on Alibaba sites are counterfeit on average, though Taobao remains on the U.S. government’s list of “notorious markets” rife with copyright infringement. In 2009, Zhang and his team created Singles’ Day, an annual deals-fest that coincides with a relatively obscure Nov. 11 celebration of singlehood. Zhang spent months pushing merchants to get on board, then oversaw sales, promotions, and items to be featured on key webpages. Sales hit $135 million the second year, then $5.8 billion in Year 5. Last year the total hit $31 billion, far beyond the U.S.’s big shopping holiday, |
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Black Friday. The momentum from Tmall and Singles’ Day “basically made the company the retail giant that it is today,” says Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Built. Jerry Yang, a member of Alibaba’s board and a co-founder of Yahoo! Corp., says Zhang’s low-key style is a plus. “Daniel’s results speak louder than words,” says Yang. “He’s all about execution.” Subsidiaries such as Freshippo are part of what Alibaba is calling, optimistically, “new retail.” The combo stores were conceived by Freshippo CEO Hou Yi, who was planning to create the company on his own when he met with Zhang in 2014. Over coffee, Zhang persuaded him to join Alibaba instead and gave him $100 |
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million to start with no expectations of profits for the first two years. “Then I knew how determined he was,” says Hou. “This is the equivalent of Daniel’s second startup. He said after so many years, he finally saw a project that could surpass Tmall.” Only now is Hou working out a business model. Freshippo is far from a guaranteed success. Margins are woefully thin in the grocery business, and several well-funded startups are competing with Zhang’s effort. An Alibaba delivery venture called Ele.me is also bleeding money in its battle against Meituan. Wang Xing, Meituan’s founder, told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year that Alibaba wouldn’t be able to keep up the fight into 2020. Zhang says he’s wrong, and that Alibaba is determined to take at least 50% of the market in food delivery to obtain an advantage in related businesses, such as digital-payments services. Expansion abroad may be the biggest challenge. Ma pledged that Alibaba would one day generate at least half its revenue from outside China, a target Zhang says he’ll pursue. But foreign sales are far from the goal, and gains are proving expensive. Alibaba has already sunk $4 billion into Singapore’s Lazada Group to expand in Southeast Asia, but it has struggled in key markets such as Indonesia. In March, Lazada got its third CEO in nine months. |
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While Alibaba’s spending raised few questions as consumer demand surged in China and capital markets rallied, it’s looking tougher to maintain. The company’s shares more than tripled from the time Zhang took the CEO role in September 2015 through June of last year. Since then, they’ve lost 15% of their value. The new initiatives take a toll on Zhang, too. Even by the standards of China’s tech industry, which views working “996”—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—as normal, his schedule is intense. During the week in Hangzhou, it amounts pretty much to work, eat, and sleep, according to a former colleague. On weekends, Zhang usually meets two or three CEOs. Besides trying to out-hustle his rivals, he’s also got to contend with the memory of Ma; successors to iconic chief executives often get pushed aside when the business hits a rough patch and nostalgia sets in. “It’s always hard to follow founders,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management. “It’s even harder when you’re following someone with global stature.” —With Philip Glamann Question Define and explain the two strategic decisions you have identified and highlight the potential role they could play in Daniel Zhang’s bundle of new initiatives which are “leading Alibaba deeper into diverse fields such as finance, health care, movies, and music.” |
In: Operations Management
Question 1 25 Marks
Malali Traders had the following transactions for 29 February 2020
financial year.
The following transactions was extracted from the books of Tesco
Traders for February 2019.
1. Malali Traders borrowed N$ 18 400 from East Bank, and was
deposited into AC Traders bank account. AC Traders’ is Malali
Traders cement supplier.
2. Malali Traders acquired a Motor Vehicle on 01 February 2020 for
N$ 10 600 from MZ Motors and it was paid on the 2nd March 2020 by
cheque.
3. Sold goods on credit to Jayz Traders valued at N$ 28 000 and
received a cheque of N$ 25 000 in full settlement of account on the
20 April 2020.
4. Purchased good for resale from NTN for N$ 8 000 and paid by
cheque on 28 February 2020.
5. Cheque issued to NTN was dishonoured on the 29 February 2020
(see no.4 above).
6. Issued a debit note to Jayz on the 29 February 2020 for N$ 2
000.
7. Sold goods worth N$ 22 500 to SSS on credit, and SSS paid 10%
deposit into Malali Traders Bank upon signing the sale contract on
07 February 2020.
8. Mr. Malali deposited N$ 11 000 into the business bank account on
01 February 2020 and in the same day he withdraws N$ 1 000 cash for
business use.
9. Received Computers worth N$ 7 000 on 03 February 2020 as token
of appreciation from Web Trader.
10. Sold goods valued at N$ 5 000 and received a cheque of N$ 4 750
from Unam in exchange for goods on 29 February 2020.
Required:
Page 12 of 14
Journalise the above transactions as at 29 February 2020: NARATIONS
ARE NOT REQUIRED
In: Accounting
A company wants to rise $189000 in cash for a new printing process. The company secured a long-term loan of $64000, with interest rate 3.5% p.a. The remaining cash is acquired by selling shares to investors, and the investors expect a return of investment (ROI) at 7.6% per year. Assume a corporate tax rate of 32% Determine the weighted average cost of capital. Round your answer to the nearest 0.01% Answer for part 1 % The new printing process requires an initial investment of $67,000 and will generate +$4,500 per year of net cash flow for the next 19 years. The CEO of the company would like to readjust the return of investment (ROI) for their investor so the weighted average cost of capital is the same as the internal rate of return for this project. Determine the return of investment (ROI) per year. Round you answer to the nearest 0.01%. Answer for part 2 %
In: Accounting
A company wants to rise $181000 in cash for a new printing process. The company secured a long-term loan of $50000, with interest rate 3.1% p.a. The remaining cash is acquired by selling shares to investors, and the investors expect a return of investment (ROI) at 7.9% per year. Assume a corporate tax rate of 35%
1. Determine the weighted average cost of capital. Round your answer to the nearest 0.01%
2. The new printing process requires an initial investment of $67,000 and will generate +$4,500 per year of net cash flow for the next 19 years. The CEO of the company would like to readjust the return of investment (ROI) for their investor so the weighted average cost of capital is the same as the internal rate of return for this project. Determine the return of investment (ROI) per year. Round you answer to the nearest 0.01%.
In: Finance
Assignment 2
USE GAAP
INCLUDE US GAAP CODIFICATION (CITATIONS)
In 2010, the No-slice Golf Company decided to augment their very successful line of golf clubs with a new line of professional caliber golf balls. The executives at No-Slice were aware of the difficulty of penetrating the golf ball market but feel, with their name recognition and the possibility of receiving endorsements from tour professionals that were playing No-Slice clubs, chances for success were substantial. The company purchased $175 million of equipment and buildings in 2011 to begin production. The No-Slice golf ball has not performed up to expectations. The tour professionals did not care for the ball and did not endorse it. Significant improvements in golf balls by Callaway and Nike and the continued dominance of the Titleist ProV1 series made entering the market very difficult.
On July 1, 2017, the Board of Directors voted to sell off the golf ball manufacturing division. The company continued to operate the facility at current levels of production until the sale of the division was completed on June 1, 2018. No-Slice has a April 30 year end and the controller and CEO are concerned about the proper reporting for the disposal of the golf ball manufacturing division in the year-end April 30, 2018 financials. The company wants to issue the financial statements to the public by the end of June 2018. You are to draft a report to the controller and CEO identifying the issues and accounting choices associated with reporting the disposal and the authoritative guidance that exists to determine the proper manner of reporting the assets, liabilities, and results of operation for the division.
In: Accounting
Percy Footwear acquired all the voting stock of Simali Inc. at the beginning of 2016. The acquisition cost was $400,000, and Simali’s book value at that time consisted of $25,000 in capital stock and $75,000 in retained earnings. Revaluation information for Simali’s identifiable net assets is as follows:
It is now the end of 2020 (five years after the acquisition). Simali’s retained earnings at the beginning of 2020 is $125,000, and it reports net income of $45,000 for 2020. It declares no dividends. Percy uses the complete equity method to report its investment in Simali on its own books. Simali sells merchandise to Percy on a regular basis, at a markup of 20 percent on cost. Total sales made to Percy in 2020 were $200,000. Percy’s beginning inventory balance has $12,000 in merchandise purchased from Simali. Percy’s ending inventory balance has $18,000 in merchandise purchased from Simali.
Required
a. Calculate equity in net income for 2020, reported on Percy’s books.
b. Calculate the December 31, 2020 balance for investment in Simali, reported on Percy’s books.
c. Calculate the original balance for goodwill, reported for this acquisition.
In: Finance
The students in University of Glasgow have done public survey and 200 people involved to the survey. It is proved that, 110 out of 200 people wish to get their master degrees in Us Universities. Compute the probability of randomly selected 7 students at least 6 of them wish to apply to US universities for their master degrees (according to the public survey)?
In: Statistics and Probability
Consider the following scenario. Suppose that the free-trade price of a ton of steel is €500. Finland, a small country, imposes a €60-per-ton specific tariff on imported steel. With the tariff, Finland produces 300,000 tons of steel and consumes 600,000 tons of steel. As compared with free trade, steel production has risen by ½ while steel consumption fallen by 1/7.
(1) Draw a picture of Finland’s domestic market to illustrate this scenario. Please label all prices and quantities under free-trade and under the tariff.
(2). The tariff makes Finnish steel producers better off.
(3). The tariff makes Finnish steel consumers better off.
In: Economics