Dr. Ed’s blog- The Four Phases of the Bull Market indicates and explains four different stages of a Bull Market, which is “a financial market of a group of securities in which prices are rising or are expected to rise”(^1).  As the diagram above shows, the bull market starts from the early 2009, and we are now encountering the 4th Phase, which is described as euphoria by Sir John Templeton, a British stock investor.

I find this blog useful because Dr. Ed analysis the bull market’s S&P 500 Index for the past several years and make expectation for the future market. For investors, they could make determinations about whether to invest in the market or not by checking the developing trend of the market. Apart from that, although the general trend of a bull market is generally increasing through years, we can see from the diagram, there has slightly downward slopes between each phase. Analysing which period a business current in can helps investors to decide the right timing for investments in order to make better feed back.

I also find this blog interesting because Dr. Ed uses both Sir John Templeton and Laszlo Birinyi, two professionals’ descriptions of bull market’s four phases, which makes audiences have better understanding about the characteristics.

Dr. Ed Yardeni’s blog link: http://blog.yardeni.com/2014/07/the-four-phases-of-bull-market-excerpt.html

Reference: ^1 www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bullmarket.asp

The biggest reason for poor countries, like Africa needs the Arc or social enterprise while having fully funded by the United Nations is lacking of knowledge and skills, therefore cannot make efficient business operation and production.

United Nations only provide funds to the poor countries, but if the government wants to solve poverty from basic level rather than immediate but fragile growth, it should focus more on the quality of workers and efficiency of production. Arc, the program run by Sauder School of Business which bring students, alumnus together with African entrepreneurs to help enhance their business; social enterprise, the group of people who saw tragic episode into chance and ambitious to tackle major social issues would bring new blood to African local business. With professional knowledge, those groups of people could make different plans according to different structures of business, therefore to generate better profitable production and improve citizens life qualities.

For instance, Fitih Tesfaye, who owns a restaurant but now struggling with increasing competition inside the region, learnt and used strategic map in Arc to develop a brand new product of dessert, which generate higher monthly income than the country’s GDP. This shows, skills and strategy used by Arc or social enterprise could help more for local business by solving problems according to symptoms.

http://skollworldforum.org/about/what-is-social-entrepreneurship/

http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/Global_Reach/ARC_Initiative

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/going-global/in-a-crowded-market-ethiopian-entrepreneur-finds-a-sweet-way-to-stand-out/article17912688/

Adam Sibbald’s blog- Acquisition, not Innovation is a high quality blog. First of all, the structure is clear and the writing is professional with learning knowledge from COMM 101. Secondly, examples and self-opinions for business future competition are given.

In Adam Sibbald’s blog, he thinks technological companies would transfer their strategies from innovation to acquisition of small business by larger, which would concentrate competition in the market and then result in monopoly with only one of these companies left standing.

I agree with some of his ideas. For instance, acquisition would lead to more concentrated competition with fewer business inside the market, which would result in decreasing supply with increasing price,  as well as higher profit.

However, I do not think companies would totally shift from innovation to acquisition, especially for technology industries. Innovation is the key point for technology companies to develop. Consumers are always seeking for better functions and designs for products, not unitary and high price goods. Therefore, become a monopoly among one market is not a wise decision for both business and customer. Besides, political forces would disturb the market. Government would set regulations to motivate competition in order to lower price and differentiate products.

Adam Sibbald’s blog link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/adamjsibbald/2014/10/05/acquisition-not-innovation/

Jeremy Chen’s blog -The sky is the limit provides a detailed and strong background about recent aviation industry, which suggests the increasing forecast demand of Boeing and Airbus, two biggest plane producers, results higher pressure on supply chain manufacturers to keep up the producing pace while maintain a high quality. Operation could help to build a specialised and efficient supply chain structure to maintain steady profitable growth.

Although Jeremy Chen provides a clear paragraph to summarise the fundamental idea of the article from The Economist, he does not provide his own opinions about the topic he chose. One of my suggestions is that he could refer to the other provided link under his blog to analysis how the manufacture supply chain can improve production efficiency while maintaining a high quality.  According to the article “Freudenberg Gives Airbus 1350 XWB a Lift” , Freudenberg’s new NOK Sealing Technologies provide A350 XWB aircraft a mechanical high-lift system for more efficient take-off  and landing, which would shorter the distance and time before and after air travel.  In this way, a more commercial aircraft model is built and supplied to Airbus company to fit in higher demand with less time-consuming products. Besides, this new technology of elastomeric and PTFE can make aircraft last for longer time period with less cost on maintaining and replacing.

Jeremy Chen’s blog link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/jdchan/2014/10/04/the-sky-is-the-limit/

Reference: http://www.freudenberg.com/en/Press/Pressereleases/Pages/Auftrieb-für-den-Airbus-A350.aspx

Millennials, or Generation Y, can regard as the demographic cohort following Generation X, which is the generation born after the Western Post-World War II Baby Boom.

As a young and passionate group of people, with significant differences of value, belief as well as lifestyle from Generation X, millennials enter and will dominate the workplace in the next few decades whether Baby Boomers like or not.

From one aspect, millennials can bring new blood to business. Since technology and innovation are important factors for businesses in long term growth, millennials, with relatively better understanding of contemporary technology advancement and novel ideas will provide the business easier accesses to bigger market. Besides, they are more energetic and more willing to learn than Baby Boomers with full passion to work.

However, the Millennial generation, which “has been widely characterised as self-centred, lazy, and demanding” can influence businesses in a negative way. First of all, most of them do not like to stay at one business for a long time, which would cost the organisation a high expense for replacement. Apart from that, millennials regard flexibility as the priority of their work, which would interrupt the business frame. Additionally, because they are the generations recruit the latest knowledge, they are too confident to teach Baby Boomers, who supposed be their model.

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/16/like-it-or-not-millennials-will-change-the-workplace/#__federated=1

Business situation and decision could be affected by political, economics, social and technology factors in long run. In the example below, the First Nation acts as an essential social external factor that influence the business decision.

In this case, in order to fulfil the increasing population of northeastern British Columbia, BC Hydro planed to construct a dam and hydroelectric generating station on the Peace River to promote oil, gas and mining industries. However, this project was rejected by the First Nation leaders who suggest “B.C. is Indian land”. They are concerned about the destruction of environment and wildlife habitat. Now the B.C. government is seeking a better way of cooperation but not litigation to solve this argument.

In my opinion, I think if a business want to operate in long run, instead of only considering about its internal strength and weakness, it should concern more on the external factors to distinguish its opportunity or threats. In the above case, although BC Hydro business was thinking about building a dam and hydroelectric business to support other local business in order to search for higher productivity and more revenue, it was disapproved by the First Nation as one external social factor. If this business wants to operate and success in long run, it should cooperate well with its external factors.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/First+Nation+chiefs+stage+Site+showdown/10215965/story.html 

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Premier+urges+cooperation+more+litigation+government+natives+reach+fork+road/10194776/story.html

Saskatchewan, a province of central Canada powered up an old coal-fired power on October 2nd, which is described by Maria van der Hoeven, an international Energy Agency as a historic milestone of low-carbon future. However, the cost for this technology is quite huge which make this Green Energy uneconomically behind the screen. In order to cover the huge investment, the plant’s publicly-owned operator, SaskPower considers to sell the byproducts, such as sulphur dioxide emissions and “the captured carbon dioxide to Cenovus Energy, which plans to pump the gas into oil wells not far away to boost output”. This is not really achieve “Green Energy” from the fundamental aspect since the product still relate to fossil fuel.

As my opinion, I do not think the Green Energy project really works. One reason is that although the technology is born to use, the cost is so large that people cannot afford it.  Another reason is that pump carbon dioxide into oil well is threaten to the environment, how can a project not good to the environment calls ” Green energy”.

I chose this topic because I find some decision must be making under both economical and environmental friendly way, which is sometimes difficult but interesting.

http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21622238-although-saskatchewans-new-carbon-capture-facility-start-technology-still

Before I arrived at Canada, I already knew that Chinese and Hong kong people occupy a large percentage of immigrants of Vancouver. However, after I live here for a month, I finally realise how large the percentage is. Sometimes when I walk around campus or take the sky stain, I feel Mandarin is everywhere. Why Vancouver has so many Chinese people?

I think it should relate to two aspects, one is from social side and another is from economical side. Vancouver has a nice living environment, compare with Toronto and Montreal which are cold among the year. Apart from that, Vancouver has a perfect geographical position which can directly relate to the economical reasons. Convenient transportation promotes international trade of Vancouver with other countries, therefore some businesspeople expand their business or cooperate with Canadian business which definitely increase the number of immigrants in Vancouver. Besides, Vancouver is so near to the US, which would benefit more on international business cooperation. Last but not least, I think Chinese students, which regard as international students generate commercial benefit for the university since they pay a huge amount of money for tuition. Because of that, even the school do not want to cut the number of international students, especially who speak mandarin. 🙂

http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21619213-chinas-big-e-commerce-site-dominates-its-american-peers-how-alibaba-measures-up

Alibaba went on public on September 19th GMT. Its market capitalisation for starting trade on New York’s Stock Exchange is $168 billion, which has the largest IPO in the Unite States. (IPO, is the abbreviation of Initial Public Offering, which means the first sale of stock by a private company to the public.) It is bigger than Ebay, Amazon and Paypal put together. Apart from that, according to Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida, who suggests that at average, the bigger the company is, the better in its long-run stock performance. Alibaba seems already succeeded in the beginning.

I think Alibaba has the true potential for long-run growth. First reason is that Alibaba occupies 80% online retail market in China, a country with enormous population, therefore the number of potential customers is huge.  Secondly, the ways of online shopping is very convenient and cost-saving. Since the suppliers do not need to pay for the fixed cost like rent, they can charge the products’ price a little lower with same profit. One PoD of Alibaba compare to other online commerce is Alibaba’s delivery service is better with less time.

Alibaba is a hot topic now and I do believe it can has a long-run performance.

In a business, ethic issues always interact with profit-maxmising behaviour. As my opinion, I think they are equally important and the stakeholders should pay attention to sustainable development instead of immediately boom for further business growth. However some companies take business ethics as obstacles of company running and expansion. They ignore business ethics like environmental issues and consumer respects to eliminate higher costs in order to earn more profit. This behaviour is not acceptable in business running.

One example of ethic-ignoring business is San Lu Group Co, Ltd which was a state-owned Chinese dairy products company. It was the most popular brand for infant milk power but bankrupted on December 2008 because it involved in an adulterated milk powder scandal, affecting nearly 300,000 Chinese infants and killing 6. Their product was include melamine, which would cause kidney stones and other problems.

This milk incident shocked every person. What this company do was totally immoral. Enterprise has responsibility to its costumers for their safety and health, especially for this company that their products were targeting to infants. With adding melamine, San Lu company could definitely make more profit since this chemical substance could increase protein in milk power with less cost. However this action is totally unforgivable and unethical, which make this company bankrupt at the end and their boss were sent into prison.