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How to Save a Flood Damaged Car Engine | eHow.com on 2009-09-27
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Macquarie Capital Funds on 2009-09-26
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Updated Macquarie Capital Funds Fact Sheet on 2009-09-26
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Speakers on 2009-09-12
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GMAT Prep Tutoring- The GMAT Pill on 2009-09-09
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Reshaping Cisco: The world according to Chambers | The Economist on 2009-09-01
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From “virtual health care” to “cloud computing” and “safety and security” to “routers in space”, the company is tackling more than 30 “market adjacencies”, as new areas of growth are called in the corporate argot. Mr Chambers expects to keep adding more. He hopes that at least half will be successful and generate 25% of Cisco’s revenues within five to ten years.
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He wants Cisco to become the main supplier of the essential elements of an increasingly connected economy, and to be a shining corporate example of how to use them. It should provide not only the tools of the company of the future, but also its organisational model.
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This mixture goes a long way towards Cisco’s dominance in the networking market and its high gross margins (64% in the most recent quarter): firms have continued buying Cisco gear not least because it works best with IOS (originally Internetwork Operating System), as the software is called.
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Its core markets, routing and switching, had matured: they would never again boast the annual average growth rates of more than 50% that drove Cisco’s revenues from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $18.9 billion in 2002. The firm was also running up against the law of large numbers, which makes it more difficult for big companies to grow rapidly. And however efficient the supply chain, networking gear is bound to become a commodity eventually.
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The obvious remedy was to move quickly into new businesses promising more value. Some companies would have begun gently, with one or two; Cisco went for half a dozen, including optical networks, wireless equipment and internet telephony. Today these “advanced technologies”, as they are called internally, bring in 25% of Cisco’s revenues (see chart 2).
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This gives Cisco a huge and growing field to play on. The world is getting more and more connected. Sensors and chips, for instance, are being embedded in everything from cars to appliances, pipelines and even livestock. But there is a clear danger with such a grand vision, of rushing into anything and everything. So Cisco feeds putative projects through a series of filters. Is this something customers want Cisco to do? Is the opportunity big enough and does it create demand for Cisco’s hardware? Can Cisco offer something that is really different and become number one or two in this market?
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Another way of looking at Cisco’s stretching exercises is what Jeff Evenson, an analyst at Bernstein Research, calls “application-specific networking”. The firm is betting that it can make a lot of money by combining networking gear with software and hardware specific to an industry, for instance electric utilities. “Cisco wants to offer similar services to IBM and HP—but with fewer people,” says Mr Evenson.
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The company estimates that the amount of internet traffic accounted for by video communication will increase tenfold by 2013, twice as fast as traffic overall. This deluge of data can only be managed with more and bigger routers and switches, such as Cisco’s Nexus 7000, which can handle 15 trillion bits, the equivalent of 1,350 feature-length films, every second.
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Cisco intends to push TelePresence into the home. This is the main reason why it bought Scientific Atlanta, a maker of set-top boxes, for $6.9 billion and, more recently, spent $590m on Pure Digital Technologies, maker of Flip, a range of hand-held camcorders. TelePresence at home will soon be combined with another project: sports and entertainment. The firm intends to turn stadiums into multimedia temples—and eventually to pump the match-day experience into living-rooms. Mr Chambers hopes one day to watch North Carolina against Duke, archrivals in American college basketball, with his sister while they are linked by TelePresence.
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Cisco’s other market adjacencies can be analysed in the same way. Another big one is consumer electronics, perhaps the most surprising new territory. Here too, Cisco can add a lot of value, says Ned Hooper, who heads the firm’s consumer group. More and more devices come with a connection to the internet, but their content—pictures, videos, music—is mostly still tied to one device, he argues. Cisco’s new digital stereo system, for instance, allows music to move wirelessly around the home. Again, Cisco’s consumer products have a common platform.
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the market shift Cisco intends to ride is virtualisation.
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Virtualisation creates a lot of complexity, to which Cisco has found an answer, says Robert Lloyd, who heads the group that has developed what Cisco calls the “unified computing system”.
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Finally, with its “smart grid” initiative, Cisco wants to repeat for electrical power grids what it has done for corporate networks: unify the ways in which the parts of the grid talk to each other and then add intelligence. Home appliances, meters, transformers and generators could all share data and work together to make the power grid more efficient, for example by lowering the peak load.
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For all the energy Cisco is devoting to seeking new markets, the changes it is making to its institutional structure are equally important. Whether they turn out well or badly, they are likely to be instructive to other companies too.
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It has avoided the fate of many other companies as they grow: becoming a lumbering and bloated giant. Tom Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees Cisco as a pioneer for a larger trend. Traditionally, he says, management was about “command and control”. Now, as technology makes communication much cheaper, bosses should move to a more flexible view, best described as “co-ordinate and cultivate”.
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Idea: Business planning | The Economist on 2009-08-20
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In an influential article in Harvard Business Review, William Sahlman, a professor of business administration, suggested that business plans “waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to the information that really matters to intelligent investors”. What really matters, suggested Sahlman, are four factors that are “critical to every new venture”:
• the people;
• the opportunity;
• the context;
• the risk and reward.
A great business plan, Sahlman suggested, is one that focuses on asking the right questions about these four things. It is not easy to compose, however, because “most entrepreneurs are wild-eyed optimists”. In any case, as he says, “The market is as fickle as it is unpredictable. Who would have guessed that plug-in room deodorisers would sell?”
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Emerging Asian economies: On the rebound | The Economist on 2009-08-20
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The appropriate measures needed to strengthen domestic demand therefore differ across the region. Although China’s goal should be to consume more, some of the other Asian economies need to invest more. That will require an improved regulatory environment, a crackdown on corruption, better infrastructure and—not least—greater political stability.
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A country’s long-term “potential” or “trend” rate of growth—the speed limit at which GDP can expand without igniting inflation—is determined by growth in its labour supply and productivity.
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GoodGuide | Ratings of Natural, Green and Healthy Products on 2009-08-19
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CFA Examination Results on 2009-08-18
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| August 2009
6073669
Mikkel Gabriel Manahan Gutierrez
Level 2: Pass
The table below illustrates your subject matter strengths and weaknesses.
The three columns on the right are marked with asterisks to indicate your performance on each question or topic area.
Item Set
| Q# | Topic | Max Pts | <=50% | 51%-70% | >70% |
- | Alternative Investments | 18 |
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- | Corporate Finance | 36 |
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- | Derivatives | 36 |
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- | Economics | 18 |
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- | Equity Investments | 72 |
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- | Ethical & Professional Standards | 36 |
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- | Financial Reporting & Analysis | 72 |
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- | Fixed Income Investments | 36 |
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- | Portfolio Management | 18 |
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- | Quantitative Methods | 18 |
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