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Business 104 Group Exercise
In today’s global economy, competition between some of the most established, competitive and profitable businesses may be replaced by newcomers. These may be based overseas or domestically that have re-organized. Some established businesses may suffer from decreased market share, reducing revenues to the point that drastic action is needed to foster survival or dissolution of a business.
Restructuring and Divesture Strategies are at that point considered. Will the business be involved in restructuring by cutting costs and formulate new marketplace strategies. Chapter 11 bankruptcy be considered for protection from creditor’s while attempting to resolve solvency. If a business cannot be saved, it may be liquidated.
Basically why have the businesses that you are investigating, reduced its workforce. Is it part of a plan to restructure, by cutting expenses, shedding business operations that are not competitive. How have these companies done in terms of revenue over a number of years, employment growth or loss, new products. What are these businesses attempting to do to survive?
Group 1 will analyze several Retail businesses such as Macy’s, JC Penny, Sears, Circuit City.
Group 2 will analyze several manufactures such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, Ford or GM.
Group 3 will analyze several service businesses such as Citicorp, Bank of America, Verizon Wireless, AT&T.
Group 4 will analyze several retailer businesses such as[PS1] Kmart, Dollar General, Payless and The Limited.
Your answers should be written with an introduction about the business, a brief history and growth in employment, locations and revenues, competition resulting in revenue losses, staff reductions and business restructuring attempts. What happened to these businesses. Are there any alternatives suggested differing from what the business actually did? Any lessons for the future?
http://fortune.com/2015/09/20/biggest-corporte-layoffs/
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/25/kimb-j25.html
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-s… managingdownsizing.aspx
*A hint is to look up annual reports 10k and look for information such as gross profit and profit after taxes for each business, declining revenues point to less employment, stores etc.
An example is looking up Sears Holdings- official site, Dollar General Corporation annual reports. I believe looking back 10years to present for data is good. You can go back further. Gets the stats for let’s say 2006 then jump 5 years and record changes each year financially with positive or negative revenues, employment etc. of course tell why these conditions happened . The demise of the company for instance in the case of Circuit City and the reasons this happened is important. New articles that pertain to downsizing, employees layfffs etc. will bolster financial or other data.