Nike is one of the largest companies that manufactures mainly sports footwear and sells its products all around the world and with a annual revenue of over 20 billion dollars. There is no doubt that the company is successful, but it does face the ethical controversy. Back in about 2008, Nike was reported to establish sweatshop in such Asian countries like Vietnam, India, Indonesia and China. Workers working in sweatshop are paid with extremely low wages that is far less than the standard hourly wage rate and cannot get the overtime wages for working extra hours. Moreover, this kind of sweatshops provide workers the poor working environment where the safety and rights cannot be protected.
I think business ethics are especially essential to companies that are weak and in the perfect competition, because once a described company decides to persue short term profit by not performing the business ethics, the consequences are serious. The company may be less competitive, which means it will lose almost everything due to the lack of loyalty and the fact that there are millions of substitutes in the market. However, when the company gets bigger and earns a lot of loyalty of its costumers, the ethics become unimportant in terms of revenue. For instance, although the Nike’s sweatshops was reported in 2008, its annual revenue still keep increasing from 12 billions 2008 to 22 billions 2013. Same situation could also happens to Oligopoly and Monopoly. Therefore, for those companies that have a considerable number of loyal consumers, the business ethics are weakly related to revenue, whether the companies are ethical depend on whether the leaders of the companies believe in the sentence high standings should shoulder more responsibility.