Month: October 2010

Toyota’s reputation for building high-quality cars and trucks has been badly hurt regarding to the high volume of complaints that its accelerator pedals contained a defect. As a result, sales are declining compared to the same period last year. Although being criticized of having a late response, Toyota showed great attempt in carrying out the fixing plan, in order to

“to appease regulators and show customers that it is aggressively addressing concerns about its vehicles”.

According to the Toyota’s SWOT analysis, this revealed Toyota’s cars building’s weakness, also directly exposed the company to other competitors in the industry. This is a crucial time for immediate actions since Toyota’s most well known strength, which differentiates the brand from most American brands, is losing its image in consumers’ eyes. Toyota is aware of Tata’s Nano entering the market with intense competition in pricing, which used to be one of Toyota’s strengths as well; thus building trust of the consumers in the brand as first priority. So it seems, Toyota is doing well, positive results are shown in the article.

Any wrong turn would result in fatal end, but hopefully, even though waited for a while before taking actions, Toyota’s insistent effort would be paid off.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05toyota.html?ref=business

Antipsychotic drugs for decades were used only for serious mental diseases, but nowadays they are the most profitable pharmaceuticals,

“generating annual revenue of about $14.6 billion and surpassing sales of even blockbusters like heart-protective statins”.

Many antipsychotic drugs are not testified as harmless to its users, but their advertisements intensely claim so.

However, how these antipsychotic drugs have become so popular is not a secret; and the cunning tactics of marketing these products are revealed now and then

“according to previously confidential industry documents that have been produced in a variety of court cases”.

The whole article reveal several ways these companies managed to create image for these drugs while minimizing any side effects the drugs might have.

“Slides for one new antipsychotic drug contended that it had no neurological side effects. “They made it all up,” Dr. Kruszewski said. “It was never true.”

This demonstrates serious violation of ethics in business. Still, the problem cannot be easily eliminated, since if these pharmaceutical companies suffer too much impact, the patients will be directly harmed by the lack of other medicines. But at least, lawsuits have entered to raise awareness, to tell those companies that there are consequences of their fraud.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03psych.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=business

The US stock markets showed significantly good signs during September, indicated the best quarterly performance of the year.

“Friday’s gains come after the Dow surged 7.7% last month, its best September performance since 1939, and rallied 10.4% in the third quarter”

With all the positive growths shown in the last month, investors should gain some more confidence in the market. However, this is not the case.

“Investors are hesitant to put more money into the market at the start of October due to skepticism that the strength seen in September can continue without a pullback.”

Even though the market is doing very well, this does not seem to convince the investors that this dramatic growth will last long without another dip. The numbers do not have much weight on investing decisions; however, what does is investors’ speculation of the near-future performance of the economics and this does not seem to be very positive. Even though last September has been noted as the fourteenth consecutive month of growth, investors looked closely at “certain data points triggered alarm about the economy’s health.” The stock market after all does not reflect much the present growth of the economics, but rather the future speculation of growth. But at the moment investments do not have a direct relationship with these speculations but rather with the confidence in the market. At certain point, we hope that “The economic numbers are going to start to matter again.” and hopefully investors will start to pour the money into the market.

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-rise-on-hopes-for-global-growth-2010-10-01