Olin Beauty Corporation manufactures cosmetic products that are sold through a network of sales agents. The agents are paid a commission of 18% of sales. The forecast income statement for the year ending December 31, 2020, is as follows:

The company is considering hiring its own sales staff to replace the network of agents. It will pay its salespeople a commission of 9% and incur fixed costs of $7,050,150.

Under the current policy of using a network of sales agents, calculate Olin Beauty Corporation’s break-even point in sales dollars for the year 2020.

Calculate the company's break-even point in sales dollars for the year 2020 if it hires its own sales force to replace the network of agents. (Round answer to the nearest whole dollar, e.g. 5,275.)

Here are comparative balance sheets for Velo Company.

Additional information:

Prepare a statement of cash flows for 2020 using the indirect method. (Show amounts that decrease cash flow with either a - sign e.g. -15,000, or in parenthesis e.g. (15,000).)

The accounting department needs to forecast electricity expense for one of the buildings. The data for several months is supplied below. Be careful since the data is listed beginning with the most recent. The forecasting method to be used here is the linear regression. Please round your forecast to the nearest whole number.

On January 1, 2020, LMB, Inc. purchased some equipment for $42,000. In order to prepare the equipment for use, LMB had to pay $8,000 to have the equipment installed. LMB aos estimates that the equipment will be used for 5 years and that it can be sold to a smaller company for parts after 5 years. It expects to sell the parts for $5,000. LMB will use the equipment for 5 years but also estimates that it will produce 10,000 units in total during that time.

LMB's units of production were as follows:

2020: 2,000 units

2021: 4,000 units

2022: 2,000 units

2023: 1,500 units

2024: 500 units

Using the Units of Production method, calculate depreciation expense for the year ended December 31, 2020 (first blank) and for the year ended December 31, 2021 (second blank).  

In the third blank, fill in the total accumulated depreciation after the 2nd year (12/31/2020).

In the fourth blank, fill in the net book value of the equipment on 12/31/2021.

Question 11 options:

THE Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign. But they’re not alone.

There is today an enormous gap between the way many C.E.O.’s in America — not Wall Street-types, but the people who lead premier companies that make things and create real jobs — look at the world and how the average congressmen, senator or president looks at the world. They are literally looking at two different worlds — and this applies to both parties.

Consider the meeting that this paper reported on from last February between President Obama and the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October. The president, understandably, asked Jobs why almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were made overseas. Obama inquired, couldn’t that work come back home? “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs replied.

Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies — and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere.

These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in America.”Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.

Victor Fung, the chairman of Li & Fung, one of Hong Kong’s oldest textile manufacturers, remarked to me last year that for many years his company operated on the rule: “You sourced in Asia, and you sold in America and Europe.” Now, said Fung, the rule is: “ ‘Source everywhere, manufacture everywhere, sell everywhere.’ The whole notion of an ‘export’ is really disappearing.”

Mike Splinter, the C.E.O. of Applied Materials, has put it to me this way: “Outsourcing was 10 years ago, where you’d say, ‘Let’s send some software generation overseas.’ This is not the outsourcing we’re doing today. This is just where I am going to get something done. Now you say, ‘Hey, half my Ph.D.’s in my R-and-D department would rather live in Singapore, Taiwan or China because their hometown is there and they can go there and still work for my company.’ This is the next evolution.” He has many more choices.

Added Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc.: “I always remind people that 96 percent of our potential new customers today live outside of America.” That’s the rest of the world. And if companies like Dell want to sell to them, he added, it needs to design and manufacture some parts of its products in their countries.

This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.

And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.

In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America. In a world where talent is the most important competitive advantage, there is no country that historically welcomed talented immigrants more than America. In a world in which protection for intellectual property and secure capital markets is highly prized by innovators and investors alike, there is no country safer than America. In a world in which the returns on innovation are staggering, our government funding of bioscience, new technology and clean energy is a great advantage. In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.

If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research, smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re that close.

What does Friedman suggest elected leaders need to do? In your opinion what do you think should be the role of corporate leadership?

H&M, a Fashion Giant, Has a Problem: $4.3 Billion in Unsold Clothes

In the world of fashion retailing, where shopping is fast moving online and stores try to keep inventories closely matched to sales, even a small stack of unsold clothes can be a bad sign. What about a $4.3 billion pile of shirts, dresses and accessories? That is the problem facing H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, which is struggling with a mounting stack of unsold inventory.

H&M outlined the buildup in its latest quarterly report on Tuesday, prompting questions of whether the company is able to adapt to the fierce competition and changing consumer demands reshaping the global apparel market. Signs of its expanding unsold inventory began emerging last year, when it reported an unexpected quarterly drop in sales. The decline was the first in two decades, a period in which H&M expanded from a lone women’s wear store west of Stockholm to a gargantuan network of 4,700 stores around the world.

Foot traffic in the past year fell as customers eschewed crowded shop floors in favor of online shopping, or lower-cost offerings elsewhere, a challenge hitting a wide array of “fast fashion” retailers. On Tuesday, the company said the pile of unsold stock had grown 7 percent in the past year and was now worth nearly 35 billion Swedish kronor. The scale of the problem illustrates H&M’s vast size — as one of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers, it produces hundreds of millions of items each year. There are so many that a power plant in Vasteras, the town where H&M founded its first store, relies partly on burning defective products the retailer cannot sell to create energy.

Analysts have been pressing Karl-Johan Persson, the company’s chief executive, over the issue. Inventory levels were up, Mr. Persson said, because H&M was opening 220 new stores and expanding its e-commerce operations, and so needed to fill the racks. Critics, however, blamed poor inventory management and underwhelming product offerings, prompting once-loyal shoppers to take their wallets elsewhere. The company said operating profit fell 62 percent in the three months through February, sending its shares to their lowest closing price since 2005 on the Stockholm stock exchange.

It is the latest in a series of issues for H&M. The company had to close stores in South Africa and faced a social media backlash after it ran an ad in January showing a black child model wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” Also, it and other retailers in Europe are girding themselves for an expected push by Amazon into clothing retailing, one that Amazon has already been making in the United States.

Since the early 2000s, business has largely boomed for fast fashion retailers such as ASOS, H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara. They profited off their ability to generate, at a vast scale, rapid translations of runway fashions into low-priced clothing and accessories. But while luxury brands have enjoyed a rebound in fortunes in recent months, fueled by millennial appetite and a recovery in demand from the lucrative Chinese market, mass-market companies have had to deal with enormous changes. In the digital era, the challenges around offering trendy apparel before it goes out of style have mounted, particularly as growing numbers of shoppers choose to buy from their smartphones and become more quality conscious. ASOS is an online-only retailer, and Inditex has managed to ramp up its digital sales. But H&M, which also owns brands like Cos, & Other Stories and Arket, has fallen behind the pack.

Analysts have been downbeat on the Swedish company’s outlook. Rahul Sharma, founder of Neev Capital, called H&M “a slow-motion wreck” after the release of the first-quarter results. Analysts at the Swiss bank UBS said in a note to investors this month that they had come away from an H&M presentation in November “with no clear view on why focus on the core customer had been lost, and what was being done to fix it.” H&M has insisted it has a plan, saying it would slash prices to reduce the stockpile and slow its expansion in stores. It said it hoped its online business would expand 25 percent this year. Still, Mr. Persson, a grandson of H&M’s founder, acknowledged that the rapid transformation of the industry was weighing on his company. “The start of the year,” he said, “has been tough.”

10. How do the concepts of price sensitivity and elasticity of demand impact the sale of clothing & accessories at H&M. Explain your thinking with examples.

8. How H&M could leverage the use of technology to enhance its online and offline channels? List and briefly describe three trends that are currently having the greatest impact on the future of retailing.

6. H&M needs to work on their integrated marketing communications plan, they need to build out a plan for changing people’s behaviors and adding a larger audience. What do you believe are the three best tools for this? Explain how your various tools would work to capture the audience and what you would do to maximize profits. Please provide more details.

Question 6 Gunther Plc provides the following information on its acquisitions of non-current assets:

(1) A non-current asset (asset a) was acquired on 1 January 2016 for £100,000. It had no residual value and a useful economic life of 10 years. On 1 January 2019, the useful economic life was revised to 6 years. The company depreciates similar assets using the straight line method.

(2) A non-current asset (asset b) was acquired for £12,500 at the beginning of 2017. It had a useful economic life of 5 years and no residual value. On 1 January 2019 the asset was revalued to £15,000. The useful economic life remains unchanged. The company depreciates similar assets using the straight line method.

(3) A non-current asset (asset c) was acquired for £25,000 at the beginning of 2017. It had a useful economic life of 5 years and no residual value. On 1 January 2019 the asset was revalued to £30,000. The useful economic life remains unchanged. Asset c was sold on 31 December 2019 for £16,000. The company depreciates similar assets using the straight line method.

Required:

(a) How would each of the transactions (1) to (3) be accounted for in 2019?

(b) Compare and contrast accounting for tangible assets with that for intangible assets. Your answer to this part of the question should not be more than 200 words.

The intangible assets section of Salmiento Corporation’s balance sheet at Decem-
ber 31, 2010, is presented here.
Patents ($60,000 cost less $6,000 amortization) $54,000
Copyrights ($36,000 cost less $25,200 amortization) 10,800
Total $64,800
The patent was acquired in January 2010 and has a useful life of 10 years. The copyright
was acquired in January 2004 and also has a useful life of 10 years. The following cash
transactions may have affected intangible assets during 2011.
Jan. 2 Paid $45,000 legal costs to successfully defend the patent against in-
fringement by another company.
Jan.–June Developed a new product, incurring $210,000 in research and development
costs. A patent was granted for the product on July 1, and its useful life is
equal to its legal life. Legal and other costs for the patent were $20,000.
Sept. 1 Paid $40,000 to a quarterback to appear in commercials advertising
the company’s products. The commercials will air in September and
October.
Oct. 1 Acquired a copyright for $200,000. The copyright has a useful life and
legal life of 50 years.
Instructions
(a) Prepare journal entries to record the transactions.
(b) Prepare journal entries to record the 2011 amortization expense for intangible assets.
(c) Prepare the intangible assets section of the balance sheet at December 31, 2011.
(d) Prepare the note to the financial statements on Salmiento Corporation’s intangible
assets as of December 31, 2011.