Indonesia’s Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), the world’s largest pulp and paper company, was attacked in 2011 by Greenpeace in a global campaign against buyers of APP packaging, particularly Mattel. The managing director of APP’s sustainability and stakeholder engagement (SSE) had to address lost sales and the accusation of greenwashing and devise an appropriate response to Greenpeace’s challenge while implementing the APP Group chairman’s goals to promote climate conservation, community, and commerce. In November 2014, the managing director of SSE had to assess the current progress of the Forest Conservation Policy and APP’s relationships with its stakeholders.
On April 13, 2011, slightly more than three months before an annual conference of the Academy of International Business (AIB) was to be held in Nagoya, the program chair of the conference had to decide whether to go ahead with the conference as planned after a massive earthquake struck Japan on March 11, triggering a horrendous tsunami and subsequent radiation leak after damaging a nuclear plant. Each challenge posed a threat to the successful operation of the conference, and the interaction among them, combined with the element of time, rendered the program chair's decision-making process increasingly complex.
The chairman of Gome Ltd, a well known appliance retail chain, congratulated his management team for their excellent performance over the past year. For three consecutive years, Gome had been ranked the largest electrical appliance retail chain in China, and the second largest overall retail chain. Claiming to be the only true national player, Gome achieved total sales of RMB23.9 billion in 2004 and in 2005 doubled its number of stores to 426. The company's four-year plan is to capture 10 to 15 per cent of the market share nationally. Gome would need to double the number of stores in the coming three years, and more importantly, it needed to work out a strategy to fend off its local and global competitors.
The marketing manager of Jewellworld.com was faced with the problem of a saturated Hong Kong market, and has to consider ways in which to expand the business. In a meeting with the marketing director, who was responsible for the development of the Hong Kong and Chinese Jewelry markets, one of the main topics was the expansion of the online shopping strategy into the B2C area in China; however, the staff of the marketing department held different views. The immediate question was whether Jewellworld.com should move into the B2C area at full speed or wait and see how other competitors fared in the China online market. The other issue was the segmentation that Jewellworld should employ if they decide to enter the B2C market in China. A competitor had established retail stores across China. The question was whether Jewellworld should aim to cover all market segments and product lines, or target young people who tend to use the Internet more frequently.
The semi-annual meeting of the board of Toppan Moore, a joint venture between Toppan Printing of Japan and Moore Corporation of Canada, took place in Tokyo. With sales exceeding US$1 billion, Toppan Moore was a leader in the Japanese business forms industry and widely considered one of the most successful international joint ventures in Japan. While pleased with the venture's recent results, the issue for the board members was how to ensure continued prosperity.