Assessment- Case Study - Case of Apple Inc.
A few weeks ago the editor in chief of a regional newspaper offered you the opportunity to write weekly columns on economic issues for Saturday editions. Since then you have been actively analysing different aspects of the economic impacts of different events using your knowledge in Economics. As a Bachelor of Business degree graduate you are particularly interested in the concept of price elasticity of demand and supply, you also know that the price elasticity is an important element of market structures (i.e.buyers in different markets have different price elasticities of demand). Last Saturday you published a column about power of markets. In your column "Market Structure and the Firm Behaviour"you discussed the differences and similarities between perfect competition and monopoly markets and provided an example for each type of market structures. In your column you also indicated that price elasticity is a way of looking at sensitivity of price that is related to product demand. A fewdays after publication of your column you received an email from the secretary of the Economic Society of Australia - QLD branch congratulating you on your last influential article, inviting you to be a keynote speaker in the near future event called Young Economist Speaker, aconference to beheld in Brisbane.You are quite excited about this opportunity and accept the invitation. You find out that the Young Economist Speaker series this year focuses on Price Policies for New Products.The conference secretariat informs you that the organisers in particular are interested to focus onthe multinational technology company, Apple Inc. as an example of a product-driven company with significant global presence. To make discussions more narrowly focused the conference secretariat sends you a few News articles as background information (published by BBC) and a set of three targeted questions,and requests you to answer those questions in your keynote address. (As students you are expected to answer all these three questions in essay format).
Questions:
1. What type of market structure Apple Company can be considered to be in? Clearly explain your answer and provide at least 3 reasons to support your answer. (tip: only focus on types of markets that have been covered in the lectures and ignore the rest)
2. In the News articles attached to this document it is implied that the large increase in Apple's revenue and profit in 2017 has been associated with a deliberateprice increase. How can you explain this association?
3. Describe Apple's cost structure, and carefully examine Apple's economies or diseconomies of scale.
Attachment:- Case-Study-Apple-Case.rar