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Grower-owned Zespri is the sole exporter of New Zealand-grown kiwifruit outside of Australia and New Zealand. Facing growing international competition, Zespri invested in consumer branding and innovation, which has led to new types of kiwifruit that taste better and are protected with patents. Consumer response has been positive and Zespri has begun to grow kiwifruit outside of New Zealand in order to have the product on retail shelves year round. Is this the right strategy for the future?

Despite a rough start in the Japanese telecom market, by late 2003, Vodafone seemed to have weathered the storm, largely based on the strength of their mobile phone unit. But was it simply the calm before the storm?

By 2005, Vodafone Group was losing its footing in the sophisticated Japanese telecom market. What were they doing wrong? Should they cut their losses and leave Japan, or could they learn from mistakes and turn things around?

The case illustrates the challenges faced by a marketing manager when designing, implementing and evaluating trade promotion schemes in a highly competitive, fast moving, consumer goods multinational company in the emerging Asian market of India. The purpose of the case is to provide exposure to the complexities and dynamic context of Asian consumer goods marketing and learn how to design, implement and evaluate trade promotion schemes that are aligned with the branding, marketing communication and marketing strategy of the product/brand. The case illustrates marketing decisions and their implementation in the Indian market for snack foods, where factors such as products at small price points, constant product and brand innovation, and effective design of trade promotion and merchandising schemes are critical in gaining and retaining market share.

Dave Roux, co-founder and chairman of Silver Lake, a private equity (PE) firm specializing in technology investments, was meeting with the firm's investment committee via video conference to discuss options for Silver Lake's future growth. While the private equity market had suffered since the economic crisis in the fall of 2008, Roux believed a number of opportunities still existed. There was significant interest within the firm to continue to offer new asset class investment products and to open additional outposts in foreign countries. Nonetheless, questions had risen internally regarding how much and in which directions to grow. Roux wondered how the firm could take advantage of the market potential while continuing to remain true to its original vision.

The 'Cola Wars Continue: Coke and Pepsi in 2010' case examines the industry structure and competitive strategy of Coca-Cola and Pepsi over 100 years of rivalry. The most intense battles of the cola wars were fought over the $74 billion CSD industry in the United States, where the average American consumes 46 gallons of CSD per year. In a "carefully waged competitive struggle," from 1975 to the mid-1990s, both Coke and Pepsi had achieved average annual growth of around 10%, as both U.S. and worldwide CSD consumption consistently rose. However, starting in the late 1990s, U.S. CSD consumption started to decline and new non-sparkling beverages become popular, threatening to alter the companies' brand, bottling, and pricing strategies. The case considers what has to be done for Coke and Pepsi to ensure sustainable growth and profitability. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Qualcomm in 2009 and 2010 experienced both the worst of times and the best of times. During the "great recession" of 2009, smartphones growth stalled, stalling Qualcomm's revenue, but in 2010 growth surged again, and was predicted to continue its upward trajectory in 2011. This brief case updates Qualcomm's struggles with FLO TV and BREW, while outlining the new opportunities for Qualcomm in emerging categories such as tablet computers, displays, and new operating systems for smartphones.

No longer content with being the world's factory for low-value products, China has quietly opened a new front in its campaign to become the globe's most powerful economy: It's on a quest for high-tech dominance. In pursuit of this goal, the Chinese government has ensured that it will be both buyer and seller in certain key industries by retaining ownership of customers and suppliers alike. It has consolidated manufacturers in those industries into a few national champions to generate economies of scale and concentrate learning. And it is co-opting, cajoling, and coercing multi-national corporations to part with their latest technologies, imposing regulations that put those companies in a terrible bind: They can either comply with the rules and share their technologies with would-be Chinese competitors or refuse and miss out on the world's fastest-growing market. Foreign companies doing business in China cannot wait for balancing macroeconomic forces or multilateral solutions; if they wish to survive as global technology leaders, they must bring greater imagination to bear on the problem. Above all, China's maneuvers cast into doubt the optimistic premise that engagement and interdependence with the West would cause capitalism and socialism to converge quickly, reducing international tensions. Storm clouds are gathering over China and the U.S. in particular. Can two economies with such radically different structures and objectives peacefully coexist? Most people expect that the systems will eventually become more similar. However, the authors argue, this will happen only when China becomes as rich-and as technologically advanced-as the U.S.

La Fageda is a manufacturer of high-quality, naturally-made yogurts in northern Catalonia, Spain. La Fageda is substantially different from its main competitors such as multinational Danone in that it is a 270-person workers' cooperative with 60 percent of its membership made up of mentally disabled individuals. Since its establishment in 1982, the organization has aimed to integrate the mentally disabled by providing meaningful jobs and dignified salaries. As of March 2010, La Fageda has opened up a new production facility to make ice cream in an urban area outside of its well-known agricultural farm. Students are faced with understanding La Fageda's business model and how it competes against multinationals.

Avion Chemicals has approached Artemis Controls regarding the purchase of an Artemis smart valve to manage the highly volatile phenol in its production process. Although an existing valve could be used, discussions lead to the possibility of designing a new and potentially much improved valve. Time, engineering, and software constraints make the valve-redesign project a risky endeavor. The tension between delivering the old valve and developing the new valve is centered on the marketing opportunity and financial risk. The A case decision can be structured with a basic decision diagram, but the analysis cannot be completed because likelihood statements are presented as "weasel words." In addition to the alternatives presented in the case, students might propose several risk-reducing possibilities: delivering the standard valve if the new valve is only moderately successful, delivering the standard valve if the software development is extended, reframing the price structure for the resultant new valve, and proposing a contingent contract with the software developer. The A case is a modification of "Orion Controls (A)" (UVA-QA-0480). The probability statements of Orion have been replaced by the weasel words of Artemis. This modification allows the discussion to be less "numbers" oriented, more structural, and more strategic.

Nine Dragons Paper (NDP) is the largest paperboard manufacturer in China and one of the largest in the world. Led by Mrs. Cheung, CEO, chairman, and founder, it has successfully grown to the top of the industry through a "grow at all costs" strategy. But in the spring of 2009, the company's rising debt levels had combined with declining margins to send the company's share price tumbling. The market was increasingly worried that Mrs. Cheung's strategy was putting the company at risk.

In December 2003, the Pacific LNG Consortium feared it was nearing an end to its long-term effort to develop Bolivian natural gas for export. Three companies--Repsol YPF (Spain, 37.5%), BG Group (United Kingdom, 37.5%), and Pan-American Energy, a unit of BP (United Kingdom, 25.0%)--comprised the Pacific LNG Consortium. The Consortium's objective, in short, was to develop Bolivian gas, build a pipeline to the Pacific coast, construct a liquefied natural gas (LNG) liquefaction facility, and export the LNG to California via pipeline from a port in Mexico. The project's economic viability was based on two critical factors: ready access to Bolivian natural gas for at least thirty years, and a long-term sales agreement for the gas. Although Pacific LNG had a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the contractual sale of the gas, the MOU was about to run out, and the Bolivian government was still debating the political and economic issues related to the export of its most precious natural resource-natural gas. The Consortium needed to make a last-ditch effort to save the project.

This module note provides introduction to the field of global strategic management/international business.

For decades, computer scientists have tried to teach computers to think like human experts. Until recently, most of those efforts have failed to come close to generating the creative insights and solutions that seem to come naturally to the best researchers, doctors, and engineers. But now, Tony Hey, a VP of Microsoft Research, says we're witnessing the dawn of a new generation of powerful computer tools that can "mash up" vast quantities of data from many sources, analyze them, and help produce revolutionary scientific discoveries. Hey and his colleagues call this new method of scientific exploration "machine learning." At Microsoft, a team has already used it to innovate a method of predicting with impressive accuracy whether a patient with congestive heart failure who is released from the hospital will be readmitted within 30 days. It was developed by directing a computer program to pore through hundreds of thousands of data points on 300,000 patients and "learn" the profiles of patients most likely to be rehospitalized. The economic impact of this prediction tool could be huge: If a hospital understands the likelihood that a patient will "bounce back," it can design programs to keep him stable and save thousands of dollars in health care costs. Similar efforts to uncover important correlations that could lead to scientific breakthroughs are under way in oceanography, conservation, and AIDS research. And in business, deep data exploration has the potential to unearth critical insights about customers, supply chains, advertising effectiveness, and more.

An economic downturn can quickly expose the shortcomings of your business strategy. But can you identify its weak points in good times as well? And can you focus on those weak points that really matter? Drawing on some 25 years of research, Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons identifies seven questions all executives should ask in order to ensure their strategies' success. Have you identified your primary customer? Decided whether shareholders, employees, or customers come first? Narrowed down which performance variables to track? Have you set creative boundaries? Are you generating creative tension? Are you promoting cooperation among your employees? And at the end of the day (and in the middle of the night), are you thinking about the right issues as you ponder how the future will change your business? The answers to these questions can be tough, and their full implications are not always immediately clear. Simons provides a real-world guide to the various alternatives and their risks, illustrating his points with examples from companies including Home Depot, McDonald's, Merck, and Pfizer. There is no magic bullet that can target the pitfalls of your business strategy, Simons concludes. But you must engage in ongoing, face-to-face dialogue with those around you concerning emerging data, unspoken assumptions, difficult choices, and, ultimately, action plans. You and they must be able to give clear, consistent answers to the seven questions Simons poses if you want to be sure that your strategy is firmly on track.

In virtually every industry, the focus of green competition is shifting from a race to launch new eco-friendly products to a battle over what constitutes a "green" product in the first place. The definition can vary from one sector or product to the next, but whatever your business, if you're not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against standards you can't meet. Once you understand what degree of standardization exists in your industry and what your company's internal capabilities are, you can choose from among four strategies the authors offer: adopt existing standards; co-opt them by negotiating beneficial modifications with a standard-setting body; define standards where none exist; or break away from the current standards by challenging and supplanting them. In the building sector, for example, LEED certification is considered definitive, so architects, construction companies, and office furnishings suppliers naturally choose to adopt LEED standards. But the coffee industry has more than a dozen competing standards, so Starbucks decided to create its own-the C.A.F.E. Practices.

Many firms sit on the sidelines of global competition, believing they need to develop innovative products or leading brands before venturing abroad. The international success of Spanish companies like Telefonica, Freixenet, Banco Santander, and ALSA proves such thinking dead wrong. They all became global players in their industries-by excelling at old-fashioned capabilities. The Spanish firms skipped the risky, expensive strategy of opening their own facilities overseas. Instead, they extended their reach through acquisitions and alliances, focusing first on Latin America and Europe. Political and networking savvy helped them break into highly regulated or complex markets. Speed has also been a factor in their success: Rapid project execution allowed them to pull ahead of other multinationals, and with their expertise in vertical integration, they've been able to get products quickly and cost-effectively to far-flung customers. Though all these skills may be humdrum, Spanish firms have made the most of them and have become industry giants as a result.

Behavioral biases can result in suboptimal acquisition decisions-with the potential for errors exacerbated in consolidating industries, where consolidators design serial acquisition strategies and fight escalating takeover battles for platform companies that may determine their future competitive position. To guide objective managerial judgment, and to rationally anticipate the irrational behavior of rival bidders or financial markets, this article proposes a modified option-game toolkit for serial acquisition strategy. It brings together insights from both strategy and finance, which quantify acquisition strategies, thus allowing executives to make rational intuitive decisions under uncertainty.

The days when companies could rely on a poison pill and antitakeover statutes to fend off hostile bidders are long gone.

Companies that can offer a scarce and coveted good or service that others cannot, will win. Goods and services that are scarce are those that are difficult to conceive, to make, and perhaps at first even to sell. The default for most organizations is to do easy work, such as running a factory, opening a big-box store, making and shipping a product. That used to be the way to grow an organization, but no longer. The only way to avoid the race to the bottom is to create something difficult and valuable, something that people will pay more for. Examples of difficult work include creating things that are tangibly or conceptually beautiful, finding an elegant solution to a problem, and connecting with and leading people.