In a recent article, Wal-Mart Executive stated that over 475,000 employees get paid over $25,000 as a means to show that they are well-paid employees. However, this created an outburst with the rest of the employees as they currently employ 1.4 Million people meaning that the others get paid less than this amount. Last week a large protest outside Wal-Mart arrested 50 people. Currently the Wal-Mart employees as well as the employees at Target are threatening to walk out on Black Friday.

This article shows the importance of keeping the workers happy and how important a good image for the company is. Therefore, when companies try to exploit low cost labour to save on overall expenses it may cost them a lot more in the end, with having to increase salaries and manage the reputation interpreted by the customers. Furthermore, another study showed that Wal-Mart can financial afford paying their customers a 50% increase in Salary as the CEO of Wal-Mart netted a staggering $23.2 million in 2012 and the gross profit is in the billions. Overall, an increase in pay may be what Wal-Mart need to do to save costs in the long-run.

Article: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/12/breaking_wal_mart_workers_strike_as_target_
workers_threaten_to_join_black_friday_walkout/

Financial Information: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/12/wal-mart-pay-raise/?iid=HP_River

PepsiCo, the world’s largest snack-food maker is going to invest 330 million rupees with its partners in India by 2020. The chief executive states that “India is a country huge potential” and that they aim to increase their product range sold in India. This enormous investment will both benefit PepsiCo and India, with a future forecast of creating over 100,000 jobs to the Indian economy. India is already a rapid growing economy and therefore the decrease in unemployment rates in India will further boost their economy.

This will also aid PepsiCo as India has a very high rate of unemployment and therefore the labour market will have a lower wage rate. Therefore, PepsiCo will benefit from low labour costs and economies of scale as well as gaining new customers in untapped market stating that they will focus on rural areas of India. “We’ve only scratched the surface of the long-term growth opportunities that exist for PepsiCo and our partners.”  The U.S. company, which opened its first operations in India in 1990, also is going to start to recruit Bollywood actors as brand ambassadors to get a greater share of India’s snack market.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24898994

PepsiCO Marketing Campaign with Indian Actress

Sears Canada Inc, said it would sell 50% of it’s stake in eight Canadian properties. Sears a struggling retail store, has suffered a steep decline in same-store sales and has lost a lot of its market share through tough competition from U.S retail giants Walmart and Target. Therefore, in order to stay open and continue, Sears has decided to sell them to Montez Income Properties Corp, a company which invests in real estate.

This sale will liquidate a lot of the assets that Sears currently owns and will help cash flow problems. However, the cost of this will be over 1,100 jobs lost at the stores that will be closes down. This may cause company image and reputation problems as well as large redundancy costs. Sears is likely to further lose market share and control. The joint-venture assets however was stated to remain the same as “selling to Montez impact neither our store operations nor our ability to serve customers.”

http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/11/11/sears_sells_stake_in_8_properties_
but_says_it_will_keep_stores_open.html

There’s no doubt that technology helped the marketing world to a very large extent. Reaching more customers, cheaper prices and targeting a more specific audience group. However, how far can this go? Recently, a swedish online newspaper called Expressen encouraged their customers to talk to the advertisement. The advertisement then engaged in a full-conversation with the viewers. Making it the first example of an interactive voice advertisement. This is stated to be very effective as “An ad on a mobile device is a very inanimate thing – people don’t take much notice, If you look at adverts right now, be they mobile, print or broadcast on the web or TV, the individual stares at it, listens and possibly absorbs some of it.The experiments we’ve done so far show that if you interact with the ad through speech the recall is far stronger,” – stated by John West, the architect of Nuance Communications.

Could this be the future of all advertisements? To completely engage the audience and increase the level of interactivity. It may be able to answer many questions that the customer has about the product and inform them on a level to which a normal advertisement couldn’t.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24384335

Tim Hortons; Canada’s beloved coffee company looks to expand it’s brand into global markets. Tim Hortons looks to expand outside it’s home base and the United States starting with the Middle East. The chief executive stated “This is not about plastering the Tim Hortons brand everywhere, this is about taking the brand where it makes sense and where we can further build,” However, this will not be an easy transition as there are huge competitors in foreign markets that have most of the market share and strong customer loyalty bonds. Coffee is part of many people’s routines and many customers prefer it a certain way and find that there is no need to switch as they know exactly what to get from their own coffee shop.

Even at home Tim Horton’s is facing pressure from competitors such as Starbucks and McDonald’s Cafe. As Starbucks reported to have 11% of all sales in the U.S and Canada come through their new mobile application. Therefore, creating a chance where Tim Hortons could potentially look into to benefit from online purchases as a way to expand globally.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/tim-hortons-profit-climbs-8-as-us-
sales-edge-higher/article15308632/

Two Swedish students Anna Haupt and Terese Alsti have created the world’s first invisible bike helmet. Although the word invisible may be a bit misleading, the overall concept fits the criteria of being invisible. The new and innovative helmet took over 7 years of research and many designs to be created. It works on the basis of a simple car airbag. After wearing a neck brace, the technology built in will detect when the rider is falling or crashing hence deploying the helmet from within. This will help protect the rider from any crash and will make it so that they do not have to wear anything on top of their heads that could bother their view.

However, in my opinion this idea will not catch on as fast as expected due to many possible reasons. Firstly, being the accuracy of the technology and how well and fast it can predict the incident and deploy the helmet. Will it be able to accurately ensure every angle and every type of fall is covered? Also, will it deploy with minor bumps in the road? However, if these problems are addressed, this new innovation could be the future of many safety products.

http://www.hovding.com/en/how_it_works/

Video: http://vimeo.com/43038579

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24426744

Innovation. The process of introducing new ideas that may affect products or the way in which they are made. It can also be considered as the commercial exploitation of a new invention. Innovation in technological companies are especially important because they are all looking for that new product that no one has come up with yet but the customers are dying to have. Companies like Microsoft and Apple are the masters of innovation, coming up with hundreds of products that set them apart from all of their competition. That’s what LG is trying to achieve here, by introducing the first curved and flexible OLED panel for the smartphone. The South Korean firm has announced that it hopes to sell the curved screen phones next year.

To me innovation is all about starting a new trend and going outside the norm in the industry. Looking at the basic structure of how cell phones have changed can back up this argument. With the majority of the cell phones in 2012 and 2013 being smartphones without a keypad shows the change in consumer purchasing habits. Prior to this, most phones used to have keypads and most of them were not smart phones. All people needed was the ability to text and call. Now people play games on their phones, search the internet and watch movies. Therefore, this article and move from LG is interesting to see. Could it be that in a year or two from now the curved screen phone will take the same effect as a phone with no keypad and make it so that the majority of phones are curved for the convenience of the consumers?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24419570

A-month long strike has finally come to an end as a 10% increase this year and 8% increases for the next two years has finally been agreed upon by the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa. The strike started like many others, in which a the workers felt they were being a terribly low minimum wage that did not agree with their working effort and hours. However, the strike seemed to cause large problems in the industry due to the multiple disruptions and conflicts. It has been said that exports have been affected primarily as the halt in production failed to meet its export quota.

It has even been stated that large companies such as BMW have stopped future plans to expand in South Africa. This can be very damaging for the industry in many ways, as it provides the government with less revenue and the expansion may have caused job opportunities leading to a decrease in unemployment in South Africa. This shows the power and proportions of the strike, also leading to why the 10% pay deal was agreed by the opposing forces.An overall loss of 2 Billion Dollars in lost output from companies such as BMW, Ford, Nissan and General Motors. This affects the economic growth of South Africa and due to strikes in other industries such as the mining, construction and aviation industry, it raises many concerns about the stability and the rate of growth in the South African economy. These ongoing waves of strikes have been a big issue with the domestic and international companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxEpDytiBAY

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24377350

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0kjI08n4fg

180,000 cars catch fire in the United states every year, therefore a single car to catch fire that injured no one should not cause much attention. However, this particular car happened to be a Tesla Model S. Tesla Motors is a car manufacturer built around electrical cars. The reason that this car model catching on fire caught the eye off so many due to the fact that its batteries might have been to blame, which is a danger for multiple cars.No one was injured during the crash and the cause of the fire is still unknown. However, the shares in Tesla took a 6.2% fall after this incident; the largest one day decline since July.

This type of event was expected by Tesla due to the nature of the lithium-ion batteries, this has always been a worry or issue that Tesla had to deal with. There is no certain sign of faulty batteries in any other Tesla cars, however they must be careful as another fire or another incident may cause an even larger decrease in share prices. This would harm many of the stakeholders and may lead to large recovery costs. Therefore, contingency planning is needed immediately and appropriately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23990485

An ethical decision is one that meets both legal requirements and shares ethical standards of the community. In this case, on both accounts Apple has acted unethically. Recently a US judge has restricted technology giants Apple for fixing prices of e-books which is also known as collusion. In most countries this is illegal and governments try to prevent and abolish this in order to protect consumers. This is because by colluding, the firms involved can come together to set the prices higher for the consumers to increase revenue earned. Furthermore, the consumers do not have many substitutes this cannot be negotiated and demand does not decrease thereby acting like a monopoly. In this case, an e-book that was typically priced at $9.99 on sites such as amazon rose to $12.99 or $14.99 (BBC).

We can say that this is an unethical decision as it affects the stakeholders of Apple and the other e-book retailers in a negative. The stakeholders that are negatively affected are the consumers as they have to pay a higher price for the same product that is not worth that much. However, this since there will be an increase in revenue due to the price increase, the shareholder and internal stakeholders will have benefits from this.