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“Our focus in the short-term is on continuing to grow and learn in this part of the world (the Middle East) before embarking on further expansions internationally,” Chief executive Marc Caira  said on the company’s financial results conference call.

At home, Tim Hortons is facing pressure from Starbucks and the McDonald’s McCafe line which are luring customers with different choices and a broad range of prices.

In other areas, Tim Hortons has fallen behind. According to Starbucks reported last month, 11 per cent of its sales in the U.S. and Canada come through technology built into its mobile app. Although Tim Hortons has an app called “Timmy Me,”  it doesn’t allow customers to pay with it.

Reference : http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/tim-hortons-chain-looks-to-expand-across-the-globe-1.1532688

How to achieve their expanding goal? The first clare and operative step is to build a functional app which can compete with the Starbucks. As for their products and marketing, Tim Hortons should focus on Points of Differences instead of competing directly with the cafe giants. Find their unique customer segments especially young people and make marketing strategies for them.

The Economist Blog : http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-6

Twitter has taken advantage of a provision in America’s Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups Act—or JOBS act for short—that allows “emerging growth companies” to kick off the IPO process confidentially.  The firm hopes that by keeping its financial performance under wraps for a while, and then heading swiftly to a listing, it can avoid the kind of hype that surrounded Facebook’s IPO in 2012. The JOBS Act also lets emerging growth firms talk to big investors privately to gauge the appetite for their shares.

According to JOBS act 2012, this usual way can be used by companies with annual income lower than 100 million dollars. Though this way, Twitter can keep their financial situation confidential and protect their own privacy. They still get chance to get IPO.

reference: http://www.cnetnews.com.cn/2013/0923/2990683.shtml

This post is in response to Jessica Lao’s post on Sweatshops

Sweatshops

For more than a decade, sweatshops have been a grim issue. With the development of globalization,  multinational corporation (MNC) or multinational enterprise (MNE) put their branches in developing countries with low wages, hazardous materials and situations for employees. They take advantages of labour and environment resources with a low cost in developing countries to maximize their profit.

Their is no doubt that sweatshops is not the only problem, child labourer is also a controversial issue. According to a National Labor Committee 2006 report, an estimated 200 children, some 11 years old or even younger, are sewing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Puma at the Harvest Rich factory in Bangladesh.

These are severe ethical problems concerning MNC, the government and consumers. First of all, employees facing these problems have no choice but to work in these companies due to the low income of their families situation, in other words, little is better than nothing. Second, MNC is beneficial to local economy. Besides, products with lower cost have lower price which most people prefer.

The most responsible part of these is the government, they need to formulate laws and regulations to improve labours’ rights.

Reference： http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/NLC_childlabor.html

Video & Reference : John Wood Talks Business versus NGO’s

John Wood was on the fast track to being an executive at Microsoft but he gave it up at a relatively young age in order to form an NGO Room to Read which was focused on helping children do better in life through literacy and gender equality.

He talked about what we can take from the business world to NGO and What can business learn from NGO’s, What are the skills of NGO’s that are transferrable back to business.

For NGOs, they need also think bigger and take every opportunity to achieve their goals. Like he said, bold goals attract bold people. look at the way that large companies set goals, whether it be Google or Facebook, the charity sector can do the same thing.

For business world, the first thing they can learn is PASSION, the second thing is really authentic leadership. It they don’t regard what they do as “work” they have to do but a leisure activity or whatever they really want to do and get actually involved in it, the business world can be different.

I think for a person’s career or goal, intrinsic motivation is more important than the incentive reward.

The latest research from GlobalWebIndex shows that Chinese messaging platform WeChat has seen the most rapid growth in active users aged between 16 and 19 — by 1,021% — between the first and second quarters of this year.

The ephemeral photo-sharing app Snapchat is also growing strong; GlobalWebIndex only recently began surveying its use, but have already achieved that 10% of teens globally are using the service.

references : http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/11/12/heres-where-teens-are-going-instead-of-facebook/

Instead of just going to Facebook, the world’s biggest social network: teenagers, now have many alternative choices. According to survey, the number of teenagers active on Facebook has dropped a lot. Facebook tends to buy Instagram with $3b but was rejected. Facebook want to charge so high to buy a rival company but it cant buy any of the rival companies. I have already been tired to switch from this app to that. I’d be really happy if Facebook can provide teens with all the services and i think many people hold the same view as mine. It’s much better to improve themselves than buying other companies.

You must have heard about brand ranking. As an intangible asset of a company, it draws more and more attentions these days. In 2001 Hislop defined branding as “the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of generation segregation among competition and building loyalty among customers.”

Just a brand itself can be sold by a really high price. Some people see opportunities in it. There are some companies, they focus on starting and growing new brand. After making the brand familiar to consumers, they sell it to others and then start another new brand. That requires brand culture and strategy which is intangible but valuable.