英国留学生电子商务管理策略dissertation引言-财经管理dissertation引言
英国留学生电子商务管理策略dissertation引言-财经管理dissertation引言
财经管理
1 引言
Antonius Johannes Jurgens和William Hulme Lever在1930年建立了 Unilever公司，essay英国的多媒介公司，Unilever公司拥有大量的品牌，主要的产品包括奢侈品、食品和个人专用品等，经过长时间的发展，Unilever公司已经拥有了400多个品牌，但是Unilever公司主要关注的有13个品牌，这13个品牌每年大约能够获得100万元的利润。
Financial Management
1. Introduction
Antonius Johannes Jurgens and William Hulme Lever founded Unilever in 1930. As a British-Dutch multinational corporation, Unilever owns great number of brands in beverages, foods, personal care products and cleaning agents. After lots of acquisitions, Unilever now owns over 400 brands; however, Unilever mainly focuses on 13 brands, and all the 13 brands will achieve more than 1 billion dollars a year. And the top brands are almost home or personal care, food or beverages. Some of the top brands are Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, Becel, Hellmann’s, Lipton, Lux(soap), Omo, Sunsilk and so on. It is claimed by Unilever that corporate social responsibility is the core of its business. Still ongoing the transition to a sustainable as well as responsible company, Unilever has been through a tough time of receiving all kinds of criticisms about not achieving the claimed topics. Unilever is going through environmental and social issues. This report will give a discussion about the financial management by example of Unilever. Firstly, there is a basic background introduction to financial management. Secondly, the core of the report is an analysis and discussion of the three questions respectively analysis of discussion, assessment of budget and an evaluation of financial proposals for expenditure. Finally there is a conclusion of the entire discussion and some personal recommendations in terms of the financial management of a company. (Alan H. Anderson & Dennis Baker, 1994)
2. Basics of strategic management
To improve and enhance the firms’ performance, managers take strategic management to deal with the important initiatives. A strategic management plan requires focusing on the mission, objective and vision of the organization, and developing a practical plan and policies. For the purpose of putting the plans, policies, projects and plans into practice, the resources are supposed to be rationally allocated. Balanced scorecards are applies when evaluating the comprehensive performance of the company and the objectives. (Gerry J and Kevan S., 1999) Strategic management will point out the detailed direction of development for the company by setting goals and using tactics.
Financial management is meant to ensure a considerable flow of cash which includes the administration and maintenance of financial assets. Besides, the process of identification and management of risks is also covered. Financial managers research on the available data in order to judge the enterprises’ performance. Financial management involves from interdisciplinary areas such as corporate finance and managerial accounting. In history, some business does success and many more companies have failed, in addition to luck, there exist the right mix of products at the proper time. However, some companies which have been ranking the top of the businesses have specific methods of developing their business and thus maintain their advantages of competition. When implementing and controlling strategies, organizing, management of resource and management change procedures.
Firstly, when organizing a strategy, it should be made clear how an organizational design of a company could work with a strategy which has been determined, in which process the relationships, spans of control and SBU(strategic business units) are concerned. Resource management means the resource which is needed to implement the strategy plans. http://www.ukthesis.org/thesis_sample/guanlileizuoye/ Resource includes human resources and capital equipment, sometimes ICT equipment. Effectual change management should be set to keep the strategy positive and avoid the negative effects. In the different management levels, corporate strategy ranks first of all. Corporate strategy is the major overarching strategy plan for all parts of the diversified firm. Every firm should set business strategy in that sustainable and competitive advantage could be achieved, and success in the long run could be expected. Another level of management is functional strategies, which respectively include marketing strategy, financial strategy, new product development strategy, human resource strategy and so on. Functional strategies focus on smaller plans and are connected with each department’s specific functional responsibility. The short or medium plans are limited compared with corporate plans. All the functional departments are supposed to accomplish their own parts, which contribute to the comprehensive corporate strategies. (Philip Kotler, 2000) The SBU (strategic business unit) is involved with a specific budgeting, product decisions, hiring decisions and setting of prices. Treated as internal financial core by corporate managers, http://www.ukthesis.org/ SBU means dimensions which exceed the single business unit, and there are lots of SBU in any corporations. Although strategic management plans requires focusing on the mission, objective and vision of the organization, and developing a practical plan and policies.When focusing on one direction and pour all efforts toward it, creativity is stifled, and many fresh opportunities may be missing. As a result, businesses might be caused to define itself much too narrowly. (moneycontrol.com) 3. Analysis and discussion 3.1 Analysis of financial data Most financial data are kept in computer database and are used for analysis by managers or professional analysts. Financial data analysis is performed by analysts to study the financial condition and sales of a company.
In addition, http://www.ukthesis.org/thesis_sample/guanlileizuoye/1405.html a company’s expenses as well as profit margins. Usually, financial data are maintained on the basis of a week, a month or a certain period of time, as a result, financial analysts could compare the present data with recorded data a weak or a month ago, in order to check the profitability of the company. Financial data analysis includes ratio of cashability, ratio of assets management, ratio of liabilities, profitability, analysis of cash flows, ability to obtain cash, financial elastic analysis. In general, the original goal of analysis of financial data is to develop the wealth of shareholders and the business’s overall profitability. In terms of how earning are valued, generally, income statements could be a method to measure profitability. It is researched that bank financial reports are quite sensitive, so that the analysis could be hard. Any small mistakes are not supposed to exit since the result could be very different. What is more, calculation of interest rate could also be quite sensitive and it is important to be careful on the analysis of data. (Richmond, 2007) When making financial analysis, managers or decision makers determine the profitability of the business through some financial analyst techniques. Among the techniques are horizontal analysis, ratio analysis, vertical analysis, variance analysis and so on. Ratio analysis refers to the number of commonly-seen ratios which are derived from the financial data. Profitability, efficiency and liquidity could be measured by some ratios. Current assets to current liabilities is the ratio which helps to measure whether a business’s liquidity and bankrupt. Ratio of total debts to total assets measures the degree the company is leveraged. Analysis of variance is often involved with explanation of difference between the standard cost for a good output and actual costs. Variance analysis help analysts understand present costs well so as to control future costs better. Vertical analysis will give an insight into the internal structure of the company.
Some data such as total costs of goods that are sold, net income are analyzed in this process. In terms of horizontal analysis, there exists the comparison of the present financial statements with other periods of time. And expected results will be compared with actual results. A comparative analysis of data between businesses requires an item-by-item comparison of more than two comparable alternatives, qualifications, products, systems and so on. Financial data of different industries from different corporations could be comparable when using similar measures of performance, such as procedures, policies followed by similar accounting methods. According to record, much of Unilever’s data mining efforts before 2001 were mainly focused on MVCs (most valuable consumers) on a company and brand level. Unilever Data base is a large data warehouse which is maintained by Axciom while owned by Unilever. Unilever cleaned data set of brands which were reported to be of little usage. Unilever has experienced ups and downs in the past years which mean a dramatic reduction of more than 1200 smaller brand names, cut-down of 138 facilities for production and 51800 missing jobs. However, in a latest comparison, Unilever has done a good job compared with similar businesses. The total share capital of HUL is 215.95, while Dabur India, Godrej Consumer, Colgate and Marico are respectively 174.04, 32.36, 13.60 and 61.44. Net income of HUL is 2633.92, while others are respectively 1101.16, 1533.68, 384.05 and 873.12. According to Unilever’s official website, EU Shareholder Rights Directive which came into force in August 2009 and the Companies Act 2006 which came into force in October 2009 make shareholders approved of the amendment of the Articles of Association with respect to the cancellation of the 4% cumulative preference shares.
