Apple is the most successful corporation in the world. It is famous for its powerful electrical devices, as well as its rich applications. We can see people all around the world are using Iphone, Ipad, and Macbook nowadays. But what is the secret of success besides its strong function and appearance?

Apple turns over its inventory once every five days. “Survey ranked Apple’s supply chain the best in the world.” Comparatively, Dell turns over its inventory once every 10 days, and Samsung needs 21days. That’s why Apple is able to sells hundreds of millions of hardware all around the world without stockpile (Increase demand and price). Moreover, short turnover will result in a decrease in cost and increase in availability in product. This is a very efficient supply chain management. Also, short turnover means short reaction to consumers’ behavior, which will set up a better customer-firm relationship. On the other side, when we calculate Inventory Turn, Apple’s number is 74 that is much higher than Dell (34) and Samsung (17), which provide an absolute platform compared with other electrical devices suppliers. How to take advantage of its turnover advantage well is a big question for Apple?

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/wow-apple-turns-over-its-inventory-once-every-5-days/257915/

I found a very interesting blog from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/nov/09/microsoft-surface-cover-flaw  about Surface, which is the new version tablet computer designed by Microsoft. I would like to make comments on this blog and talk about Surface.

Microsoft, the pioneer of Personal Compute, is the biggest software supplier in the world. This software tycoon is expanding its market to hardware, symbolized by releasing its first generation tablet computer, Surface. By witnessing the success of Apple through developing its own software and hardware, Microsoft puts it into use and does the same thing as Apple did.

Surface, is the first generation tablet computer running by Windows 8 pro and Windows RT. It is cloud-connected with SkyDrive, so people can access their content from anywhere, at any time. This is similar to Apple and its itunes. Also, Surface is equipped with Touch Cover (spill-resistant keyboard for typing), as well as Type Cover that combines the speed and comfort of a keyboard with a super-thin design that’s ideal for extended usage at home or at the office.

Surface is selling by starting at $519, which is almost same as the newest version of Ipad. However, even though Ipad 4 is a perfect tablet computer, it looks same as Ipad 2 and Ipad 3, which make people feel aesthetic fatigue. Therefore, the demand for Surface will be pretty high. The problem is that Microsoft does not have app as many as Apple. Therefore, trying to create more app is the biggest problem Microsoft has to face.

Huawei (a Chinese telecom company) is trying to expand its market to the United States, one of the world’s largest markets. However, the US government is holding Huawei back from entering its market, as it does not have opaque governance structures and links to China’s Community Party. Even though Huawei is publicly recognized as being innocent, it is still facing suspicions until all doubts are cleared. Moreover, even if Huawei is allowed to enter, it will face deep rivalry in terms of threat of substitutes. They will be confronted with Apple, Samsung, HTC, which have been dominating the entire US market; also Nokia, who is coming back with its new flagship Win 8 Mobile (Nokia 920). Moreover, the fact that China once was the stereotype for selling cheap and low-quality products is vulnerable for Huawei’s image, even though it’s getting better these years. Lastly, Barriers to entry is relatively high for Huawei in America, not only due to the political reasons mentioned above, but also because of America’s policy towards foreign brands.

Huawei will experience a dramatic development if it is able to get a foothold in America, but before success, it first has to overcome the difficulties above.

link:http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/10/chinese-telecoms-firms-america

China and Japan have had a close-knit relationship with each other with respect to economics over the past few years. However, the political conflict over the ownership of Diaoyu Island (Senkaku Island in Japanese) brings to light the economical influences of both countries, especially Japan.

In China, people launched anti-Japanese demonstrations in terms of Diaoyu Island. Gradually, people began to boycott Japanese goods. Typically the Japanese automobile is the Chinese first choice due to low its low consumption of fuel and high safety standards. However, the sale volume of Japanese cars experienced a dramatic decline in the past several months in China, and has dropped by 15%. More specifically, Chinese consumers have less motivation for Japanese products due to their attachment to their own country and they also tend to choose brands of products from other countries because of the social atmosphere. Such consumer behavior brings a hit to Japan’s market and economics.

Japan has been trending downward since the Asian financial crisis. China’s market is relatively the biggest dependence of their economics growth. It will be a fatal blow to Japan’s economic recovery if they lose the Asian market that centers on China.

The point is to see what kinds of market strategies will Japan make in order to reply to Chinese consumers’ passive behavior.

link: http://www.economist.com/node/21563316

Apple and Samsung are currently the world’s two largest manufacturers of mobile phones. Both of them try to innovate their products and advertise mobile phones to customers. As competitors, they also reposition each other into worse situations in order to be benefit from it. Since April 2012, Apple and Samsung have been caught up in raging patent fight; Apple sued Samsung for copying the designs of their Ipad and Ipad 2. Apple sued Samsung for 25 billion dollars in damages. In general, experts view this as future product protection for Apple, because 25 billion dollars is really not a big amount of money for a company, which is worth over 100 billion dollars. At the end of August, the court in California judged that Samsung should pay for 10 billion dollars to Apple.

However, Apple is not satisfied with this result, and they requested the court to rule that Samsung must pay another $707 million in damages to Apple. In addition, Apple appealed the court to enact a statute that would forbid Samsung’s infringing products being marketed in America. People commonly consider this to be the way that Apple will take back the lost market from Samsung. Apple has a history of similar lawsuits，Apple once used the same method to crack down on HTC when it won the highest market share.

The purpose of patent suits is to delay competitors’ ascent, and bring severe consequences to vulnerable competitors. It’s interesting to see how Samsung might react to this and fight against it.

Nike is the most successful sports brands worldwide. However, as far as I know from Klein Naomi (2000), Nike was confronted with sweatshop scandal at the end of last century. Basically, Nike was accused people all around world of treating workers unfairly by paying them low wages. Even though workers in Nike factories worked very hard every day, the wages they earned were still not able to pay their living costs. It developed to crisis of confidence for Nike eventually, which caused a bunch of anti-Nike movements worldwide. Also, inner-cities people (especially black and Latino in US) criticized that Nike only marketed products to their children, not jobs for their parents. Nike could very successful in the last few years, but they didn’t treat people that are as good as they got. The scandal happened more than 10 years ago, but Nike still couldn’t recover completely from it.  The questions raised by Nike are: How do companies and workers deal with relationships well? How can they make a deal on fair treatment?

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