What is social enterprise?

Social enterprise is to use business tools and methods, such as business management, to achieve social objectives. It is not like a charity, because the social enterprise can also gain profits. However, the social enterprise does not pursue to maximize profits like most companies do, it mainly focus on bringing benefits to people and dealing with the social issues. Through running the social enterprise, the social entrepreneurs can create both social and business value. For example, social enterprise can provide personal services for people, like baby-sitting to satisfy the social needs of this kind of service.

What is the Arc?

The Arc Initiative is to build a bridge to exchange knowledge and experiences through internship and workshop. It involves initiating and fostering relationship between communities in Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia and Colombia. For example, people can get business skills from other communities and then apply and take back these skills to their home countries. Jeff Kroeker, Sauder accounting instructor and Arc co-creator, said, “Arc provides a unique platform to fuse this [business] education with entrepreneurs in developing countries with the goal of building capacity, building relationships and ultimately, building a better future.” Arc has such strong power indeed.

“If the United Nations was fully funded why would we need the Arc or social enterprise”?

As I just mentioned above, the main goal of social enterprise is not to maximize profit. Social enterprise is mainly about promoting social-interest, solving social problems and improving the society. If the United Nations was fully funded, social entrepreneurs can also start their social enterprises, because they are not in conflict and social enterprise is not primarily for money. Social entrepreneurs can find the social issues which affect people’s life the most, and then they uses social entrepreneurship to organize, create and start a social enterprise to deal with the social issues, improve our society and our living environment, and achieve their social objectives ultimately. The society needs this kind of social enterprise to help change our living environment. Also, Arc is a unique partnership for global communities to share their knowledge and business skills. If the United Nations was fully funded, we should pay more attention on social problems and global expansion, but not on maximizing profits and making money. Arc can expand the business circle and build a bridge in the global market. It can bring more opportunities to the global market as well. Therefore, if the United Nations was fully funded, we need the Arc to expand and connect global market and build a relationship between communities; we also need social enterprise to deal with social issues to improve our society.

Reference:

“What is social entrepreneurship?”

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

“Arc Initiative”

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

Comment on Tianye Guo’s blog:

This is what a SUCCESSFUL Entrepreneur Needs to Do

Title: That is What A SUCCESSFUL Entrepreneur Needs to Do

Author: Tianye Guo

Tianye Guo uses Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, as an example in her blog to show what a successful entrepreneur should do after being successful. Mark Zuckerberg started to learn Mandarin and tried to take and create the opportunities to enter Chinese market in the future.

After entrepreneurs start a new company and become successful on operating and managing the company, they should not stay at the same place. They should improve their strategies and enhance the employees working skills to make sure that the company can keep growing and make more profits. I totally agree with Tianye’s conclusion that all entrepreneurs know how to analyze useful and crucial information about their companies based on their current situation, but only successful entrepreneurs know how to make full use of their current information, resources and capital to create opportunities for themselves to expand their companies and enter global markets.

For example, Yun Ma (Jack Ma) is a successful Chinese entrepreneur and the CEO of Alibaba Group. He is the first mainland Chinese entrepreneur that appeared on the cover of Forbes. Is he successful? Of course he is pretty successful, and he knows what the best time is to start the company, to develop its business, to publish new service and to go public. He also knows how to utilize the opportunities to maximize the benefits and get best outcomes.

Therefore, I think successful entrepreneurs need to have better understanding of their own business. They ought to know what they should do to take the opportunities for which the markets provide, and they should create new opportunities for themselves to enter new markets and start new business by utilizing the resources and capitals effectively and efficiently as well.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma

Poor weather leads to lower quality crop.

As people know that fluctuations in the weather conditions bring fluctuations in farm output and prices and sometimes leave farmers with low incomes, and farmers always produce low-quality grains and crops with poor weather conditions.

In Canada, a snowfall and hail in September in 2013 created poor, cool and damp weather conditions for farmers at a time when the wheat crops had to dry for later harvest. Due to the poor weather conditions last year, the production of grains and oilseeds this year decreases a lot and the quality is lower than before as well. In 2013, the production of wheat crops reached a peak which is 38% increase than 2012. The quality was also pretty high and most was of highest quality. However, the total wheat production is expected to fall around 27% this year, and almost none is of highest quality. The quality is pretty low, which also influences the selling price.

Because of the low quality grains and wheat crops, the farmers cannot even get to the breakeven point and cannot get the money that they spent on growing them back. People are not willing to buy the low quality crops, so the farmers decide to sell the crops as seeds to livestock producers. The farmers use this way to get a little amount of money back as their income. As an outcome of this situation, 10-20 percent of farmers faced to sell the crops at a price which is less than the cost of production. Also, due to the oversupply of corn and soybeans production worldwide, the world price of corn drops 34% and the price of soybeans drops 25%.

This news is about how the weather conditions affect the production and supply of the grains and wheat crops, which is more about microeconomics. As the output and quality of the grains and wheat crops are much lower than before, people are not willing to buy such low-quality products and they might choose to buy much higher-quality imported grains and crops. From my perspective, if I know that the quality of the local products is not good, I will not support for them and sacrifice my self-interest to promote social-interest. I will buy better imported products just as most people will choose. In this case, as fewer people are going to buy low-quality local products, the suppliers have to look for some methods to sell them. One way that they choose to do is to lower the price, which makes the price lower than normal, and to increase the sales. However, this way seems not quite available in this case, so the farmers also sells the lower-quality grains and wheat as seeds to livestock producers to just get some money back. Also, if a product is oversupplied in the market, people will place low value on it, and the price will also be lower due to people’s decreased level of willingness to pay for it.

Reference:

“Grain farmers produced 27% less than in 2013 and face lower prices.” CBC News. Web. Oct 31, 2014

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/grain-farmers-produced-27-less-than-in-2013-and-face-lower-prices-1.2819868

Comment on Yiting Zhang’s blog:

#2 Alibaba shares surge in their NY stock market debut

Title: Alibaba Shares Surge in Their NY Stock Market Debut

Alibaba is the largest e-commerce company in China. Alibaba went public on September 19, 2014 and made it the largest IPO ever in US market, which was 22 billion dollars. From Yiting Zhang’s blog, I got some interesting points. Firstly, Taobao is the biggest online shopping medium under Alibaba, which is responsible for more than 80% of online e-commerce in China. For me, when I was in China, I used to visit Taobao when I had nothing to do even though I did not have something to buy. Taobao is gradually becoming a part of people’s daily life. However, I am surprised that there was no effect on Taobao when Alibaba went public. Why this happened?

Yiting also mentioned Alipay in her blog. Alipay is becoming a more and more common online payment method in China. People can use Alipay to pay for their telephone bill, credit card and other purchases. It’s very convenient and Chinese are more likely to use Alipay rather than giving cash directly. Once I took a taxi in China, the taxi driver asked me if I could pay him by Alipay rather than giving cash to him. I was so surprised about the popularity of Alipay. In this case, I think Yun Ma (Jack Ma) is very successful in building this online payment system. Alipay is a significant part of Alibaba, so I think Yiting found a good point.

In Yiting’s third paragraph, she asks about the reasons why people choose to shop on Taobao. From my perspective, online shopping is very convenient and we don’t need to go to a shopping mall and spend a lot of time on just walking around. Taobao is a unique shopping website which provides customers with a variety of good quality goods. The price is pretty low which can be affordable for most of people, and the quality of the goods is adequate. Also, Taobao provides a lot of goods that are hard to find in the market, so people will easily be attracted by the unique goods.

After reading Yiting’s blog, I have same feelings as her. As Taobao has become an integral part of people’s life, Alibaba should develop this online shopping system in other countries to earn more profits and expand its sales and brand influence. However, I wonder what will happen then if the company goes public and why they choose to go public. Is going public for every company a good thing?

Reference:

This link is about the secret of Taobao’s success:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-18/the-secret-of-taobaos-success

“Alibaba prices stock at $68 US in $22B IPO” CBC News. Web. Sep 18, 2014.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/alibaba-prices-stock-at-68-us-in-22b-ipo-1.2770686