A faith-based organization from Taiwan has made considerable inroads in being able to operate effectively in mainland China. Is further expansion too risky?
The world's leading Thai agribusiness corporation and largest agribusiness investor in China, CP Group, is facing another crossroads in China as the country starts to undergo rural reform. The issues at hand for Chairman Dhanin Chearavanont is how CP can balance its place as a key investor in China's burgeoning agriculture market with its unstated obligation to also provide guidance and expertise in food safety, technology, as well as jobs for rural farmers while still competing against the growing cadre of international and domestic companies vying to grab share from its operations in China. Was rural reform going to help or hinder CP's position in China and was CP doing all it could to take advantage of these changes?
Swire Beverage, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in China, recently created a corporate social responsibility (CSR) organization to oversee environmental, community, health and safety initiatives at the companies' nine bottling plants in China. The case considers organizational design decisions in setting up the committee to oversee the diverse CSR initiatives that occurred in the dispersed plant locations, and the ongoing work to better connect CSR activities to Swire Beverage's brand and business strategy. Furthermore, the Swire Beverage CSR team needed to balance the interests of important stakeholders such as the Coca-Cola company, and corporate parent John Swire and Sons. Finally, the case also illustrates some of the key challenges of implementing CSR programs in China, particularly the difficulty of finding suitable NGO partners.
This case tackles issues of regional strategy and strategic institutional arbitrage. Databank is a financial services firm designing its regional strategy for Africa and seeking to benefit from institutional arbitrage.
This case on the globalization of East Asian pop music is useful for teaching concepts of regional business strategy and also of cultural arbitrage. Music companies in the case must examine why certain markets are clearly more profitable than others. They must also decide whether to expand internationally with a regional focus on East Asia or, alternatively, a focus on the U.S. and other Western markets.