There is an ambivalence in many people’s attitudes to Japanese business techniques in the West. An admiration for their management styles and ability to penetrate Western markets is occasionally tempered by an ill‐informed suspicion that in some way the Japanese have created – or been...

What strategy would you employ when breaking into a new country? M&A, brand extension, foreign direct investment (FDI), partnering, exports, aggressive takeovers, or cautious step by step entry – the list is endless. We take a look at a couple of the most popular methods and see how they have...

With the beleaguered ABB struggling to stay out of the red as Siemens announces quarterly profits substantially up on the past months, the jury is still out on conglomerates. Are they a thing of the past or will they survive this economic slump to rise triumphant later this decade? There is...

Many organizations like to get customers “onside” in their advertising by suggesting that they are somehow in business together. Slogans such as “Together we are stronger” are proffered partly as flattery and partly to imply thanks: We couldn’t have done it without you. There’s a...

In 1991, aged 29, Park Byeong Yong of South Korea applied to numerous banks for a loan to start up a business. He did not come from a family of business leaders and neither did he have his degree from one of the top universities. Perhaps needless to say, his loan applications did not get far....

Now that the hype is well and truly over, a cooler analysis of the costs and benefits of e‐commerce can begin. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that each company’s experience is different – from the reasons why they adopted an e‐commerce strategy, to the practical challenges...

Spun off from Racal Radio Group in 1985, Vodafone Group has transformed itself in the last six years from a virtually unknown small UK‐based company into the world’s largest wireless and mobile‐phone operator. With 93 million subscribers in 29 countries, it ranks among the top ten global...

Before the privatization of British Airways in early 1987, people in the UK said that BA stood for “bloody awful”. Even allowing for the fact that British people go in for that kind of thing – one of the companies out of which BA was created in 1973, BOAC, used to be referred to as...

Anyone seeking an object lesson in the uncertainties of the business world needs to look no further than the telecommunications industry. Wireless communications increased massively during the late 1990s, a time when technology advanced at a bewildering rate. The value of companies using this...

It is no secret that when the fortunes of the telecoms sector collapsed in 2000, network supplier Ericsson was hit hard. In October 2003, the Sweden‐based firm had spent 11 quarters in the red and chief executive Carl‐Henric Svanberg admitted “I think it’s very low odds on guessing that...