Alibaba, a super popular e-commerce company in China, became the largest-ever initial public offering in the US. Alibaba is currently valued at over $200 billion, and accordingly the founder Jack Ma became the new richest man in China. In North America, Alibaba is probably not knew by too much people, but actually this is a super e-business company in the world,especially in China. Compared with eBay and Amazon, Alibaba has much greater advantage in terms of customers and cash transection, and more specifically, the value of goods sold through Alibaba last year is equal to that of the combination of Amazon and eBay (The Wall Street Journal.Web. 22 Sept. 2014.) What I am interested in this News is why Alibaba can attract so many investors to invest and make such success? After reading the letter Jack Ma wrote to investors, I believe the value propositions that Alibaba provide is right one of the answers. Ma wrote: “ We want to help small businesses grow by solving their problems through internet technology. Alibaba’s mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere.” For the last 15 years, Alibaba devoted all its effort to provide small companies and individuals more easy and convenient access to free market. This leads to a good reputation, strong image, wide acceptance and today’s success Alibaba enjoys. There should be more reasons that so many investors would like to trust and to invest Alibaba besides its insistent mission. There are also some other questions whether Jack Ma can make good use of these investment to further develop Alibaba, and is it a wise decision for investors to invest this Chinese company. These questions probably cannot answered right now, but time will tell.

Work Cited:

“Out of Control.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 20 Sept. 2014. Web. 22 Sept. 2014. .

“Alibaba: Too Big to Expropriate?” The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2014. .

After reading the article “ REDEFINING ‘CORPORATE’.”, which write by Lily Du, I am convinced that the decision made by CVS to terminate tobacco sales shows a right direction of today’s corporations. Many people believe that “the social responsibility of business is to increase profits”. Though it may be true to a certain extent, I do think this point is to extreme. Under most circumstances, it is not a conflict to increase profits and to carry on social responsibility, such as to protect environment, or to take care of health and safety of employees as well as citizens who live near factories. Because if a company can do so, its brand reputation, consumers’ loyalty, employees’ loyalty, and corporations’ culture will be improved dramatically. Then the profits will probably increase accordingly. In this sense, corporations can increase their long-term profits through adhering business ethics, though they may loss some short-term economic profits . This can be best illustrated by the CVS example that Lily Du presented in her blog. Though this action will cause approximately $2 million loss for CVS in few years, it re-organize and re-evaluate its consumers’ demands and build a fairly great company’s reputation for social responsibility. Obviously, a strong brand name and good reputation are beneficial to company’s long-term development. Also, the intangible assets, including brand name and reputation, will be increasing a lot. On the other hand, if a corporation ignores business ethics and does not carry any of social responsibility, such corporation can hardly be successful. Otherwise, if a company careless about its own employees, how can consumers believe that the company can care about customers’ health and safety. If a company careless about our environment, our hometown, how can customers believe that the company can produce qualified products without any toxins. So business ethics and financial profits should not be a conflict at all, and in this sense, every corporation should carry social responsibility and adhere business ethics for the sake of profits.

The link of Lily Du’s Blog

https://blogs.ubc.ca/lilydu/

On April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building, collapsed in Savar Upazila, Bangladesh. This disaster, which can be regarded as one of the world worst industrial accidents, caused more than 1,100 people died. Most of victims in this disaster were the low-paid workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Those workers, in order to earn comparatively higher salary, suffer from long working hours, abuse from employers and poor social security. Especially, the working environment is too bad to ensure employees’ health and safety.

Before the collapse of the Rana Plaza, in order to minimize the costs, many high street brands, such as Inditex, H&M, Primar, to a large extent, pay no attention to the health and safety of their employees. After that, those brands, and other worldwide-supplying companies have began to care about how to build a socially-responsible global chain.

According to the article “The social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, the only social responsibility of business is to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits to create more wealth as much as possible. In this sense, it is fairly reasonable for those companies to co-operate with the suppliers that provides cheapest clothes but put their employees in dangerous working environment because they can earn most profits by doing so. But actually, they should not. This is because chasing profits should based on the rules of the game, which is to say, following certain social customs and ethics. Otherwise, their reputation among customers would not be good, since obviously, none believe a company which does not care about their own employees health and safety at all would care about that of customers.

In conclusion, although the main social responsibility of business is to maximize their profits, companies should also follow some social customs and business ethics.

the links of references:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/bangladesh-factory-building-collapse-community

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2013/jul/29/responsible-business-retail-supply-chains

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Savar_building_collapse

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=10187339&page=171

Whether government should set pricing, distributions and other controlling activities are under debate at my first COMM 101 course. To my view of thinking (and most of my classmates think so as well), it depends on different products, different countries and situations. On the one hand, under most circumstances, the authority should not intervene in the market, since markets can adjust by themselves. There are so many reasons that government should not intervene in markets too much. First of all, if the authority set pricing or distribution, this action, to some extent, will limit consumers’ freedom. people should have rights to choose what kinds of products they want to buy. Also the intervention of government would probably destroy the balance which market makes itself by “a invisible hand”.

On the other hand, however, for some certain products, such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, the intervention of government is of necessity. Because if government do not control those products, some citizens, especially some teenagers, probably abuse alcohol or drugs badly. This circumstance will be very harmful to the society as well as those people themselves, if it occur. So it is the responsibility for government to impose heavy tax, set high price and control the distribution of those industries.

Yet, admittedly, government intervene too much sometimes. In my opinion, the authority should only take care of those products which should not be used widely within the society. Other products, like sugary drinks, energy drinks, junk food, which do not show a direct link with people’s health and social stability, should not be controlled by government. Otherwise, it will destroy the balance of market, and deprive of consumers’ freedom.

More importantly, there are both threatens and opportunities for those industries, which government intervene in. Threatens are pretty obvious: heavier tax decrease the profits and drive companies to increase the prices of those products, as a result, the demands will decrease accordingly. Yet, there are also two important opportunities of those industries. One is that when heavier tax is imposed by the authority, low-quality products as well as small-scale companies cannot survive in the market so that provides a stronger competitive power to those large companies. The other is that when the domestic market shrinks, this will force those influenced companies to go outside and explore a larger market.

In conclusion, government intervention, in my opinion, is necessary but only under some circumstances. Most markets have the ability to keep balance by themselves.