Innovation Revealed

This is unsurprising yet unquestioned by people. It's like the don't-know-what-you-don't know in the Johari window. The reason to Apple's innovation is of course R&D and this graph shows how much Apple has invested in such.

Supermax 4Q Earnings Surge 30 times but revenue only rose 7.4%

Supermax recently announced 4Q earnings an interesting rise of net profit from RM1.5million to RM44million!.

Supermax attributed this rise from ramping up financial and productivity management. This resulted in reduced operating expense from RM163 to RM150 million.

Compared with last year which its associate lost RM10million, this year it won RM13,4million.

We see the gain of profit by 13million (from operational cost) and 23.4milion (from associate margin), that brings up to the total of RM36.4million.

Deduct that from the final earning we have about RM8.6million profit coming mainly from gross margin(assuming other changes in margins are minimal since they are not mentioned).

That means its gross margin has increased from Rm1.5milion to RM8.6million. That's still a large increase, about 6-7 times.

Question: its revenue rose 7.4% only. The only explanation to the discrepancy is that Supermax has reduced production, sold less gloves than before but sold more expensive gloves!

How do you explain the increase production lines being propounded about by them? Has the demand drop?

Low Price Elasticity Case

Maybe its because paper is on the way out, still it's a good example of a low price elasticity case.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=141945

Bad Ideas

check out the 10 worst beverage ideas with this link

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1913612,00.html

Twittering is Out

I had written in passing that Twitter is just a business fad and many people will eventually get sick of it in no time. This survey result by Pew Research Centre is strengthening such believe.

According to the research, the percentage of young people aged between 18 and 29 who Tweet plunge from 24% to 15% from 2007 to 2009. You see however more of the 30+ age group is using Twitter, but that's because they are the laggard in the social media scene. They could just as well drop the twittering job in no time.

Cultural Factor in Ad

Cultural factor is one of the most important factor for marketers to consider in branding as it could make or brake a brand. Remember Nike foray into the muslim market with its "Air" brand, which written in such font that it looks like Arabian word for god?

Pepsi capitalize on the idea that Spanish-speaking countries can't seem to pronounce the word Pepsi, instead pronouncing Pecsi (in Argentina) or Pesi (in Spain), in their recent ad campaign. In Spain, as shown in the video above, Fernando Torres where shown to pronounce Pesi instead of Pepsi in a mock-up making of Pepsi commercial. The director insist Torres to correct his pronunciation until he got it right. In the end the angry Torres tore down the letter 'P' from the Pepsi poster.

Purists would say that this would jeopardize the brand's presence, the grand scheme of things, but at least to these countries, they seem to work.

In Argentina, the main message is actually price comparison between Pepsi and Coca Cola, that the price for Pepsi is one peso cheaper and during this economy uncertainties, you save money by drinking Pepsi instead.

For Spain, the cultural behavior of the country has to be considered when you make such marketing decision, say if the country thrive on pandering to the ego or nationalistic sentiment, such ad builds loyalty because it reaches to that emotion that which matters. Would the risk of eviscerating your brand outweighed by the leverage from capitalizing a lucrative behavioral opportunity?

Some ideas are not fundamentally correct but maybe so, it could just work looking at other facts in consideration of course.

Organizing an Event at sparse budget

I am organizing an Event which does not have much RM for me to spend on.

I am coming out with a plan to execute this event without using a single cent from my entity yet seems bend on hitting the goals.

The goal is to attract 50 attendance to the event, and recruit 5 new members to our Toastmaster Club.

The strategy is unconventional but it will prove something to me. One of which is I can achieve anything i want as long as I have the will to win.