Strategic Management
Important Note:
1. Requirement of calculating ROA for the figures available on the Balance Sheet and the Income Statement; years 2014 to 2017.
2. This assignment's word count is specified as between 2000 and 2400 to include tolerances. All words in Tables and Figures are not included in word count
3. About the ROA of competitors as the reference in the case study advise that ' [27] In the absence of perfect information & available data, students may make assumptions on the total sales achieved by competitors'However, as other data that you will need to calculate the competitors' ROA are not available, it is fine if you calculate the ROA for Home Pharmaceuticals for years 2014-17 and then explain what the figures mean and how this informs managers without comparing to competitors.
4. In the first section where the question includes the statement that you should not repeat case facts, it means that we expect students not to copy and paste parts of the section in the case (under the heading of Global Pharmaceutical Industry Factors) into the assignment answer.
What you need to do is to read through all the facts and figures provided in the case study and then, in your own words, describe industry trends, competition etc. as indicated in the assignment question. In this section it should be clear to the marker that you are able to analyse all the information, and provide a summary of the issues as indicated in the question to describe the market and industry.
5. You need to use the facts and figures about the industry as presented in the case study. The research for this assignment should be focused on the content topics (theory) that you need to address and not the industry details about growth etc.
6. These references (see numbers 12, 27, 33, and 37 in particular) provide additional guidance about what to do and they address issues related to assumptions and additional readings to enable you to successfully answer the case study questions.
7.Ref 27 indicates 'in the absence of perfect information & available data, students may make assumptions on the total sales achieved by competitors'.
The same applies for Reference 37; in the absence of perfect information and available data, you can make at least 2 assumptions about staff, sales and competitors and about comparative capabilities of the two nearest competitors. Also read Ref 33 instructing you to examine the companies for assessing key company capabilities for comparative purposes.
This means that you need to examine the two nearest competitors (see Case study 2) by accessing the websites for data about the things that you may need to compare (staff, sales, comparative capabilities); if you can't find any information about these things, you can make at least 2 assumptions about the issues.
Note that this is applicable to Case study 2 questions.These assumptions need to be noted in the appendix and not in the body of the assignment although the comparisons will be dealt with in the body.