Vincent's Blog

Xiaomi is a Beijing-based company that primarily manufactures smartphones founded in 2010. After 5 years rapid growing in Chinese market, it became one of the largest smartphone vendors, depending on its cheap costs and advanced services. The way Xiaomi doing business is unique, customers can only purchase its products through online stores, it is known as direct business model. Xiaomi setups up this business model in order to maximize its profit and minimizing the cost for customers. The partnerships with Android and WOW made the company become competitive in smartphone market, by advantages of up-to date features and free internet. One of the benefits of the direct model is customizing, where promoted the value for the Xiaomi in the aspect of knowing what people’s demands in the market. The operations managers also limit the quantity of supply when the demands exceed the production possibility frontier to make the products more coveted, which can be called hunger marketing.

Xiaomi as a middle-class smartphone brand is now facing a serious challenge in current trend of global market that technology sector has churned out significant global companies and minted fortunes. The revenue of the company has shrunk by 75% this year compared to 2014, as people prefer to buy higher-class smartphones who have better quality when the income increases. Xiaomi needs to come up with some new operations strategies in order to meet the trends. For example, Xiaomi could launch a high-end smartphone to compete with Apple and Samsung’s products and retain the costumers they might lose. Personally, I believe that Xiaomi should focus of specific group of people, who can only afford middle-class cellphone and provide services that fascinate people.

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Volkswagen is one of the most well-known automobile brands, but recently,  the use of hidden software to deceive American regulators measuring emissions from diesel-engined cars has plunged VW into crisis.

Its chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, who is responsible for this scandal, has resigned, and the company still needs to afford 8 billions dollars financial hit. However the senior management team of VW denied to admit that they know about this deceptive software. To beats its largest competitor Toyota of Japan in American market, Volkswagen came up with this” Clean Diesels” which seem to be great breakthrough in automobile manufacture industry. In reality,  it is a financial fraud made by VW and its engineers who wanted to secure company’s financing and its market position.  Volkswagen” Clean Diesels” cars covered all most quarter diesel cars in the world, so the impact of this scandal may causes the bankruptcy of diesel cars.

The deceptive software made by VW can switch off the the SCR(selectivecatalytic reduction) which is used to enhance the efficiency of fuel. This software allowed VW went through the American Standard Emission test and “The legend car” became company’s inventory asset, which laid firm foundation for VW in American market. Nevertheless, the company need to pay their debts after everyone knows their dirty fraud behind the scene, like Toyota did in 2009 for the brake scandal.

The emission causes large number of early death every year, around 58,000 a year in America alone, according to a study.  This fraud is nothing than a misdemeanor or victimless crime. I believe that the departments concerned need to investigate the similar cases strictly in  order to create a harmonious market and society.
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It is common knowledge that Nike is the biggest sports wear company  in the world, I mean, who does not have a Nike brand shoes or clothes? In resent years, Nike raised their price of the products by average 10%-15% annually, particularly, 20% price increase in sneakers.

In my blog, I am going to talk about why does Nike set their price insanely high, especially in sneakers. First of all, Nike need to come up with a S-T strategy which will profit the company before they decided to increase the price. Nike’s popularity and cutting-edge technology are definitely its strengths. However, the competition between sports wear companies(i.e. Adidas and Under armor) makes Nike losing customers. So the S-T strategy tells Nike that use its strengths to reduce the vulnerability to external treats. In order to let customers more focus on their products, Nike put more advanced technologies to its sneakers before other companies do. Because of this, Nike was able to set their price higher and draw lots of attention from sneaker lovers.

Nike also released many basketball signature shoes and limited editions (i.e. Lebrone James series, Kobe series and MJ series etc), which have great reputation around the world but the price is relatively high, $200-$350 each pair. But people still willing to buy them because the quality of the shoes has been tested and approved by public, more importantly, these brands already became the fashion and symbol in sports circles these days.

In the past few years, Nike donated and helped communities to build sport facilities in many countries for the purpose of letting everyone enjoy the sports. In addition, the companies also shares welfare to employees by giving them discount to any Nike brand products.Therefore, Nike did a successful business that it creates values for clients, suppliers, employees financiers and shareholders. Nike’s decision on raising price did not change people’s opinions because the good reputation and solid business ethics.