Companies frequently consider diversification to be a crucial strategic decision during their growth journey to mitigate business risks and pursue continued expansion. Nonetheless, when pursuing diversified expansion, companies must accurately identify the suitable industry or domain and maintain a balanced relationship between specialization and diversification. Failure to do so can have negative repercussions on their development. This case study centers around Adisseo, a well-established company specializing in animal feed additives, and examines their diversification efforts in addition to their primary operations, such as methionine, by accelerating the development of other businesses through various means. This case primarily addresses the following inquiries: How did Adisseo cultivate its core competencies throughout its eight-decade-long development? What is Adisseo's position in the global methionine industry and what strengths does it possess? Who are Adisseo's competitors in this sector, and what challenges does the company encounter? Additionally, the case examines the progress of Adisseo's other business ventures apart from methionine and identifies their competitors and challenges. It also evaluates the accomplishments resulting from the implementation of Adisseo's "two-business-pillar" strategy, as well as the problems the company faces. Adisseo's explorations and practices offer valuable insights for similar enterprises facing technical barriers and pursuing diversification.
Tianlala is a Chinese new-style tea drink brand that has been developing, producing, and selling fresh ice cream, tea, and coffee since 2015. By 2021, the brand covered twenty-eight provinces, 105 cities, and three municipalities across China. It had opened more than one hundred directly operated stores and more than six thousand franchised stores nationwide, served more than two hundred million customers, and sold an average of 1.5 million cups of milk tea every day.<br><br>It had taken only six years for Tianlala, a small, unknown milk-tea brand, to become one of the representative brands in the low-tier city market, going from being unknown to being accepted and appreciated by consumers, especially young ones. Despite this quick growth, the question for Wang Wei, the founder of Tianlala, was, How should the company reinforce its brand to grow further?
In December 2021, Steven Cahillane, chief executive officer of The Kellogg’s Company, was facing worker unrest and a union strike. After several rounds of discussion between the workers' union and management, an amicable settlement could not be reached related to abolishing the two-tier pay system that Kellogg's introduced in 2015. After negotiations unfolded and management and the union still could not reach a conclusion, the union launched a strike on October 7, 2021. How could Cahillane improve relations with the workers' union? How could he bring the strike to an end? Does Kellogg’s management have more bargaining power than workers?
DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in Israel, CEO Lihi Segal and her team are devising a global go-to-market plan for the firm. The team is considering several target markets, ranging from people with diabetes to professional athletes, and distribution strategies including selling direct to consumers or through partnerships with healthcare professionals or insurance companies. Their choices are important because they will affect DayTwo's costs, pricing, positioning, distribution channels, marketing efforts, and product development.
In December 2021, Steven Cahillane, chief executive officer of The Kellogg's Company, was facing worker unrest and a union strike. After several rounds of discussion between the workers' union and management, an amicable settlement could not be reached related to abolishing the two-tier pay system that Kellogg's introduced in 2015. After negotiations unfolded and management and the union still could not reach a conclusion, the union launched a strike on October 7, 2021. How could Cahillane improve relations with the workers' union? How could he bring the strike to an end? Does Kellogg's management have more bargaining power than workers?
Tianlala is a Chinese new-style tea drink brand that has been developing, producing, and selling fresh ice cream, tea, and coffee since 2015. By 2021, the brand covered twenty-eight provinces, 105 cities, and three municipalities across China. It had opened more than one hundred directly operated stores and more than six thousand franchised stores nationwide, served more than two hundred million customers, and sold an average of 1.5 million cups of milk tea every day. It had taken only six years for Tianlala, a small, unknown milk-tea brand, to become one of the representative brands in the low-tier city market, going from being unknown to being accepted and appreciated by consumers, especially young ones. Despite this quick growth, the question for Wang Wei, the founder of Tianlala, was, How should the company reinforce its brand to grow further?
Andrew Kress (CEO and founder) and his team had built a promising marketplace business at HealthVerity serving its core market in healthcare, with a focus on pharmaceutical R&D and services. Thus far, HealthVerity's products had been unique to the pharma and pharma services customer segment. However, there was a real opportunity to apply the underlying technology across multiple industries, for which some investors strongly advocated. The company was grappling with questions of whether to increase revenues by expanding to other verticals beyond healthcare or by going deep with its current customer base and providing end-user analytics-based applications on top of their marketplace offerings. The company believed they had a unique understanding of a technically-challenging market in healthcare, and wondered how the model would scale. Kress wondered if there were ways in which the company could focus on specific analytics solutions or end-user applications (and which ones, specifically?), and if so, would that be worth the effort and risk, or did the approach need to be all or nothing? And was he limiting his thinking about the risk and opportunity to enter adjacent markets solely because of lack of familiarity or was there a real chance to serve other customer segments well if better understood and resourced, and how quickly could the company figure out the answer to that question without risking excessive time and capital?
Beth Sharp and Jennifer Brilliant founded Miracle Therapeutics based on intellectual property developed by Brilliant and her post-doctoral student, John Supreme, in Brilliant's lab at Elite University (EU). Miracle will have to obtain a license from EU to the Brilliant patent rights and other technology, and the founders want this license to be exclusive. With venture funding waiting in the wings, Sharp and Brilliant set up a meeting with EU's Technology License Office (TLO) to discuss the terms of the license. The TLO's licensing manager, Susie Deal-maker has provided them with a licensing term sheet template for review prior to negotiating the key terms. The case explores the components of a technology/IP license and the process of negotiating a deal with a University.
"Vail Resorts, one of the world's largest snow sports resort management companies, faces serious climate change issues. For years, the organization tried to deal with rising temperatures and less snowfall by growing its resort network and diversifying its product portfolio to extend its season. Alicia Campero, Vail Resorts' Vice President of Sustainability Strategy, was leading the corporate effort to contain the company's environmental footprint while also limiting its business exposure to poor snow conditions. How should she handle negative press coverage or the intense competition from their rivals? Will she be able to provide significant value to millions of skiers and snowboarders during their resort visits? Can she manage the weather-related revenue risk and improve the company's profitability with strategic global expansion? Can she overcome the challenges of managing differences when expanding abroad in 2023? Using publicly available ski industry statistics, climate data, and country-level cultural indices, readers of this case assume the role of Campero and her team. Students must make strategic decisions about what the organization will do regarding climate change. The case provides facts on Vail Resorts' multitude of property acquisitions, stock performance, finances, and competitors, which will help readers make strategic recommendations on where the company should focus its next major geographic expansion."
Despite widespread public commitments to integrate sustainability into business models, less than a third of U.S. employers engage in practices that support that objective, recent research shows. Many employees see a lack of commitment from management and short-term focus as key challenges. The authors share six practices observed at organizations that have made good progress at embedding sustainability into the business.
As robots are increasingly being incorporated into the workforce, one unexpected benefit is the ability to better assess the performance of their human counterparts on an individual level. Based on their research, the authors describe how having humans and robots work side by side can help busy managers more easily measure and improve workers' performance, and identify and reward top contributors.
Established in 1929, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (CTF) was not only among the most popular brands in the Chinese-speaking world but also one of the largest jewellry retailers in the world with over 7,400 points of sale, mainly in Mainland China, generating Group revenue about US$5 billion in early 2023. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and rising macro-economic headwinds, how did CTF achieve a resilient business performance? Two strategies based on retail expansion and smart retailing which automated the order fulfillment process and enhanced customer shopping experiences proved successful. Moreover, elevated product offerings through brand differentiation targeting different market segments such as high-end luxury, mass luxury and youth were also implemented. As of 2023, would CTF's strategy be robust enough to face the continuing economic and political challenges? Should it continue to expand? And is its current brand portfolio too broad?
This note describes some of the most significant agricultural innovations in the Netherlands, their drivers, environmental performance implications, some challenges facing the sector, and the potential replicability of these innovations to other contexts.
Any company might one day face the test of a grave crisis that puts its very existence at risk. How can it survive the darkest moments and rise from the ashes? What is key to a company's longevity? The case of Luckin provides one possible answer. This case illustrated changes in Luckin's corporate strategy, business model, and operations strategy after its accounting fraud scandal. Luckin had previously adopted an aggressive expansion strategy. This approach featured prolific store openings, huge levels of financing, big customer discounts, and operations supported by a data-driven "new retail" system that acquired customers online and delivered products and services offline. This signature system took Luckin years to develop and refine. Customers didn't instantly abandon Luckin the aftermath of the scandal. Instead, customers rushed to Luckin stores to use up all their coupons just in case the company went out of business. While ensuring its stores could continue operating normally to keep up with this surge in demand, Luckin's new management team suspended its previous strategy and pivoted towards business performance. It focused on younger consumers and refined its operations strategy. The company launched new initiatives, including establishing private-domain traffic, introducing new products rigorously, and finetuning store operations to drive continued improvements in business performance. In August 2022, Luckin claimed to have "risen from the ashes and completely reinvented itself" as it announced second-quarter earnings. At that point in time, however, China's coffee segment was witnessing many emerging brands backed by deep-pocketed investors. Could Luckin sustain its growth amid such competition? How could it stay competitive?
The case outlines how the strategy for launching rice bran oil, a less consumed edible oil, was modified with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tirupati oil by NK Proteins is one of the top 3 edible oils sold in Gujarat. Three months before the launch of the rice bran oil, the director passed away. With pandemic restrictions still in force, there was a change in the management with the next generation taking over. Amidst this chaos, the rice bran oil was launched. Within a year of its launch, it became the market leader in Gujarat. To achieve this goal, the company did three things differently from the competition. First, it focused on affordability and marketed it to the masses unlike their competitors who portrayed it as a premium product for a niche customer base. Second, they weighed on their huge distribution network and created a push product by directly supplying rice bran oil to the distributors rather than going through the traditional via the traders, and third, they positioned the oil as an immunity booster vis-Ã -vis the heart-healthy positioning adopted by other players. After this successful launch, the next plan of action was to professionalise NK Proteins from its traditional way of working. The new MD, Priyam Patel, felt that this was the only way to expand the business and take it to the next level. But would the personnel working with the company since before Priyam was born be receptive towards the change? Furthermore, the nearest competitor, Fortune, was looking to gain lost ground and thus posed a new challenge. Tirupati had always positioned its product as a healthy and immunity booster oil. With other competitors also highlighting the health benefits of their oil, Tirupati needed to strengthen its competitive positioning. Could a consumer survey provide them insights to evaluate their positioning strategy?
Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content (e.g., text, image, or audio) in response to a prompt from a user. ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are examples of text generating AIs, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are examples of the image-generating variety. During training, a generative AI learns the underlying structure of the desired output by absorbing a mass of relevant data - all of the books in the public domain, for example, or petabytes of text scraped from across the internet. Once trained, generative AIs work by creating outputs that recreate, with calculated variation, the underlying patterns learned in training. In 2023, all these types of generative AI were created in a similar process. At the core of any generative AI system is the model, a mathematical representation of patterns that forms the basis of 'knowledge' for the system. The structure of the model is determined by its architecture, the theoretical organization of parameters in an artificial neural networks that the system uses to generate its outputs. To learn, the model relies on a mountain of training data, a collection of examples relevant to the task the model is being trained to perform. During an initial pre-training process, the model learns to adjust its parameter-weights (assumed by the architecture), improving its prediction quality with many iterations over time; that model is further refined through a fine-tuning process. Training an AI system requires specialized hardware, like GPUs in data centers, that consume enormous amounts of electricity to handle heavy and massively-parallel computational loads.
Women's empowerment means empowering women on multiple dimensions: economically, psychologically, socially, and politically. Historically, women have suffered from disproportionately reduced access to resources and opportunities. Financial literacy and inclusion are especially important to overcome the dependence of women on their husbands. This aspect is more important in situations where the husband-wife relationship was strained for a variety of reasons. Shikha Mittal founded Be.artsy to empower women to speak up and manage their finances, with financial literacy and consequent empowerment acting as the impetus for overall women's empowerment. Experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace and domestic violence prompted Mittal to design and offer programs to corporates. These programs aimed to address the above problems through customized training programs for employees of these companies, which comprised Be.artsy's business to business (B2B) markets. Although these programs were supplemented with street plays and interventions in colleges, the B2B channel was the primary channel Be.artsy used to reach out to women; it generated revenue and created an impact. Be.artsy chose financial literacy as the key pillar for women's empowerment and drove its programs through tie-ups with institutions. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mittal launched an online program, Be Your Own Lakshmi (BYOL), that imparted financial literacy education. With free initial sessions that demonstrated the importance of financial planning and promotions through social media, BYOL had garnered some traction, with many people wanting to sign up for the paid BYOL offering. However, Mittal's desire to use BYOL as a vehicle to speed up the achievement of her vision of empowering millions of women remained unfulfilled. She needed to choose the right approach to scale BYOL, but the dilemma remained: Should she scale BYOL using the B2B or business to consumer (B2C) route?
In December 2021, Valiant Capital Partners (VCP) is in the middle of bidding for Citrix Systems, Inc. (Citrix), to take the company private via a leveraged buyout (LBO). The auction of the renowned desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) company had attracted a number of bidders. VCP's initial bid of $15 billion ($92 per share) had allowed the fund to move to the final bidding round. Now with broader access to the company and its management, VCP has to revise its bid. Mohan Bhargav and William Hill, both with VCP and working on the Citrix deal, learn that Vista Equity Partners (Vista) has partnered with Elliott Investment Management (Elliott) to enter the bidding. Elliott bidding was not a big surprise. This activist investor had a subsidiary private equity (PE) firm created specifically to pursue private investments in mature tech companies. Plus, by December 2021, Elliott had amassed more than 10% of Citrix shares. Joined by Vista, an established leader in the field of technology-focused PE investments, the pair made a formidable opponent. It didn't help that one of Vista's portfolio companies, TIBCO, was a perfect roll-up candidate to pair with Citrix. In this David-versus-Goliath situation, Bhargav and Hill needs to figure out how much higher they can push VCP's bid and what the chances are that the VistaElliott consortium could outbid VCP. The case offers an opportunity for students to (a) evaluate classic LBO structures, cash flows, incentives, returns, and risks; (b) introduce the related roll-up PE investing strategy and associated risk/return investment profiles; and (c) evaluate the role of leverage in LBOs' success.