個案總覽

After a massive earthquake destroyed many buildings in Haiti in 2011, reconstruction has become a source of opportunity and competition for non-governmental organizations, international business and local companies. The Haitian chairman and CEO of a very successful, multi-million dollar information technology company wants to provide affordable quality housing, especially for the disadvantaged poor, using steel frame technology from his start-up, KayTek. What he has not yet determined is how to get his product to market. He has three options: to keep sales and construction in-house, to outsource, or to franchise in order to create opportunities for young Haitian engineers to become entrepreneurs. Each option has costs, in terms not only of finances and time but also of control of brand quality and accessibility.

The CEO of Newmont Mining Corporation (Newmont) had learned that a subcontractor’s truck en route to Lima from Yanacocha, a gold mine operated by Newmont, spilled mercury along the highway and in small villages. Local residents had picked up some mercury with their bare hands and taken it to their homes. The CEO was trying to determine the best way to handle the situation. This A case describes the mine developer’s history, the operations at Newmont’s most profitable gold mine, the significance of foreign investment to Peru’s economy, the environmental impact of gold mining and the local and anti-mining movements' responses to mine operations. In the B case, Newmont Mining Corp. and a Mercury Spill in Peru (B) 9B13M003, the new CEO is trying to decide what else Newmont is morally required to implement before continuing to operate Yanacocha, and Newmont’s other mines, successfully.

This B case is a supplement to Newmont Mining Corp. and a Mercury Spill in Peru (A) 9B13M002. Since the spill, Newmont spent more than US$100 million on compensation and improvements to the mine to reduce its environmental impact and prevent further spills.<br><br>An internal audit concluded environmental standards at the mine were seriously lacking. In-house counsel warned other executives about the possibility of criminal liability.<br><br>Despite improvements at the mine, a large local protest prevented Newmont from expanding its operations in the area. Lack of trust by the locals contributed to the protest. The new CEO is trying to decide what else Newmont is morally required to implement before continuing to operate Yanacocha, and Newmont’s other mines, successfully.

After one year of operations, a young entrepreneur and his two partners must evaluate a decision that will change the scope and direction of their business, an online retail store that sells fair-trade coffee beans imported from a developing country. An opportunity exists to market the product at a farmers’ market in a large city. Most of the details have been worked out, but before a final decision can be made, the partners must evaluate the product’s financial feasibility for the company’s second year of operations. If the financials look favourable, the partners will proceed with the opportunity.

An entrepreneurial entertainment business is considering its possible entry into a new foreign market. The case does not, however, focus on the sales potential and financial considerations of entering Brazil. The company assesses these considerations by using fairly straightforward guidelines — its intuitive indications of interest based on DVD sales and attendance at performances elsewhere in the world and the availability of enough large venues to seat a certain total combined audience size. <br><br>In assessing whether to enter Brazil, the case considers the management demands likely to be encountered in that new context and the management capabilities of the organization and the staff members to effectively deal with these demands. This analysis requires the company to consider many of the same issues that are typically discussed in international management courses: the nature of Brazil’s national environment and whether Brazil’s social infrastructure includes such elements as a dependable legal system, a pool of experienced local managers and a societal culture that will support dependable and trusting relationships with venue managers and local work crews.

The profit margin for the travel agency industry in Singapore, which mostly offered travel packages to Asia and Europe, was very thin. An up-and-coming travel agency faced the dilemma of offering maximum customer satisfaction while keeping its operating cost (e.g., fees for its tour guides) low. Rather than simply assigning travel guides to tours by trial and error, a director of the travel agency decided to use an optimization template. This case requires the development of an optimization template to advise management on the optimal assignment of tour leaders (within constraints of their availability and required rest periods) and generate maximum satisfaction among the customers. Considerations for tour-guide assignment include tour guides’ customer satisfaction levels, expertise on particular tours, visas for specific countries, and employment plans.

An Indian-based software product start-up has succeeded in forging a valuable relationship with Microsoft, which has been vital to its international success. When the Microsoft relationship manager assigned to the company leaves Microsoft unexpectedly, the company’s chief executive officer needs to make some critical decisions regarding how to manage its relationship with Microsoft.

Franklin Resources Inc. is one of the largest and most respected global fund houses with a presence in India. The case highlights the structure, investment process and philosophy of its fund management team in India.<br><br>The case presents the specific issue of fund managers holding large amounts of cash during market downturns. There is one school of thought that attributes lower volatility and better risk-adjusted returns with high cash holdings. The other school of thought believes this approach goes against the philosophy of investment management. It believes people give money to fund managers to invest, not to hold in the form of cash. A fund should always be fully invested or nearly fully invested.<br><br>The chief investment officer at Franklin Templeton India is of the second school of thought and is faced with the challenge of convincing a team of young analysts and managers of its soundness. He presents a set of data to this team and asks them to analyze performance during periods of market downturns in order to arrive at a conclusion.

This case focuses on Infibeam, a small, new e-commerce company in India, as an illustration of innovative B2B contractual agreements that enabled it to acquire a significant customer base at a very low cost. However, it must now develop innovative strategies for marketing communication, customer value proposition and a new IT e-commerce rural platform in order to achieve its required growth estimates and raise capital for a new project in cooperation with a state government. Internet retailing is rapidly growing in India, but it does contain challenges: the cost of acquiring customers is high; per person spending amount is smaller; and customers are spread all over the country, often 2,000 kilometres away from supply centres.

<p>At the end of the year’s third quarter, the sales team at a generic-pharmaceutical company has achieved just 91 per cent of its sales target, and growth is less than what was anticipated. The general manager of sales needs to decide whether he can revise the sales targets for the last quarter of the year without compromising growth. He also needs to address the impact of launching a new product when the sales team is striving to achieve its budgets and devise strategies the sales team can use to achieve their sales targets during a selling downturn.</p>

The Chevalier case demonstrates how a family-controlled and publicly listed group can make use of a listed company's idle assets and turn them into a private equity-like endeavor generating better returns for all shareholders. Founded in 1970, Chevalier Group was a Hong Kong-based conglomerate operating a wide range of businesses. It was a negative change in the fortunes of the IT products distribution business that had inspired Oscar Chow, Executive Director and son of the group's founder, to enter the food and beverage (F&B) business in 2005. The purchase and subsequent sale of Pacific Coffee in June 2010 were landmarks to revitalize Chevalier Pacific Holdings Ltd under Chevalier Group. While parts of the business showed strong growth and recorded healthy profits, others had reached their peak and were showing signs of decline. By late 2011, Oscar was devising a long-term strategy leveraging the group's core competencies. What should the plan be and how should he implement it?

A non-governmental organization dedicated to improving underprivileged rural children’s access to quality education in southern India has grown considerably in the seven years since its inception. In considering a growth strategy, the organization’s two founders and managing trustees consider the roles of social value creation, funds sustainability, organizational visibility, resources constraints and how the relationships among these factors affect the organization’s future plans.

The chief financial officer (CFO) and major shareholder of a small charter sport fishing company must prepare the company books for the fiscal year according to international financial reporting standards (IFRS) rules. The CFO must deal with both finance and operating leases.

When you're in a foreign culture, you actually do adopt the ideas and behaviors of that culture. In fact, even brief exposure to a symbol of a foreign culture can shift your thinking.

Marks and Spencer (M&S) had first ventured into international markets 70 years ago. By 2012, M&S had 337 stores in 41 countries. Although M&S saw itself as a U.K. retailer that exported its products, the company had been attempting to reduce its dependency on the U.K. economic cycle. Its goal was to increase international sales from £800 million to £1.0 billion by 2013/14. By 2020, M&S wanted to be an international, multi-channel retailer. <br><br>When the company entered the Chinese market in 2008, it faced many difficulties. It had failed to conduct proper market research to understand the Chinese consumer, which had led to many issues. The company had neglected to address the cultural gaps between the United Kingdom and China. It had also taken an approach of standardizing its products, instead of adapting products to the new market. Students must consider the marketing mix policies of product, price, placement and promotion to recommend changes to M&S’s entry into China.

The (A) case involves managing the planning and execution of the first convocation held at one of the campuses of a business school in Nagpur, India, at fairly short notice. The school’s chairperson of post-graduate studies in management programs has been appointed as the chief co-ordinator of the event. Leveraging his operations-management background and working in collaboration with other faculty, he sets about identifying the required activities and their precedence relationships in order to ascertain the time required to complete these activities.<br><br>The (B) case 9B13D004 presents a situation that arises about three weeks into the project that necessitates some replanning in midstream.

This is a supplement to Convocation at the National Institute of Management's Central India Campus (A), 9B13D003.

The managing director of a multinational company turns a loss-making business into a profit-making venture by using his unique brand of leadership to change the organizational culture and develop a responsible proactive attitude in his employees. Throughout this process, many difficult personnel decisions must be made, including the decision to remove some senior employees who resist the necessary changes.<br><br>Once under the new leadership team, recruitment and talent development become essential to the future growth of the company. The managing director wonders how to manage this challenge.

On February 2, 2012, the Supreme Court of India cancelled all 122 second-generation (2G) telecom licences issued on or after January 10, 2008 by the Department of Telecommunication (DoT). This judgment, along with the announcement of the National Telecom Policy-2012, forced the DoT to rethink the issue of pricing spectrum, which was earlier bundled with 2G licences. First, was re-auctioning required? If so, what should be the minimum reserve price? Should DoT follow a uniform pricing strategy for all the incumbents, including those whose licences were cancelled? How could it strike a balance between investor apathy and the government’s objective of increasing rural tele-density, given the possibility of a tariff hike after the refarming of spectrum?

This case highlights the journey of an organization that was set up in Hyderabad, in southern India, to provide affordable maternal care services to women from low-income urban families. LifeSpring Hospitals grew from a single hospital into a chain of nine hospitals, all in Hyderabad, in only five years. The chief executive officer has spent this initial period trying out new methods, continuously fine-tuning the model and learning from this process of experimentation. As the company seeks to scale the business to 200 hospitals, the chief executive officer must decide whether or not the business model is defined clearly enough to warrant the start of a rapid scaling process.<br><br><br><br>The case is unique because it juxtaposes a commitment to high-quality health care service delivery through processes and protocols with a commitment to making maternal care affordable to low-income urban women. LifeSpring Hospitals tries to achieve these seemingly disparate objectives by attempting to create a financially sustainable business model.