Blog

Company A is hiring consultants to produce a new strategy based on pieces of advice and guidance on its current situation and future plans. Company A is a firm that owns a platform to sell second-hand

Assignment Task

The case background

Company A is hiring consultants to produce a new strategy based on pieces of advice and guidance on its current situation and future plans.

Company A is a firm that owns a platform to sell second-hand objects online. The platform is hosted on a website called R3US3 is preset with an app for Android and iOS as well, but it is not that popular.

The business model is fairly simple. The customers who want to sell something and those who want to buy something must be registered in the platform to sell or buy. Per each transaction that occurs through R3US3, a tiny percentage (e.g. 2% in 2019) of the price of the products sold is held by Company A. That is the primary source of Company A’s income. On R3US3, a premium service is offered to sellers. It consists of less expensive shipments and insurance on products sold. Similarly, the buyers can have a premium service to get the “free return” of products in the first 30 days of usage. Both the buyers and the sellers can access this service via an annual fee.

The revenues of the most relevant companies operating in the sector are in Figure 1 and Table 1. At the same time, Table 2 reports the number of transactions that occurred over the years via those companies. Table 3 contains data about the active customers (sellers or buyers) per reported company.

Table 4 contains the fixed costs of the companies in the market sector, and Table 5 reports the variable costs. Table 6 includes Marketing costs as part of the variable costs (Table 5 already includes these costs).

Jasmine is an undergraduate IT student at LSBU. After developing her IT skills, Jasmine created a freecycling app available to students and staff members within the university to recycle, exchange and/or give away unwanted and unused items. Also, the app aims to reduce the university’s environmental impact by promoting freecycling as an alternative to throwing unused things away.

With this idea, Jasmine founded Company G. The firm owns an app and website. The app was launched in December 2011 and is available for Android and iOS users. Since then, the app has gained many users and has received very positive feedback. Furthermore, it has expanded to many universities in the UK; some of them have become official partners. Jasmine and her associates have used posters (during exam season) and have marketing stalls during the university’s Sustainability Fortnight to promote the app. It was also promoted in staff and student newsletters, and it has a dedicated page on the university website.

Company A is deciding if it is convenient to acquire Company G or if it is more efficient to find a different solution to partially take over the business of Company G, becoming more present in the universities.

To analyse the customers’ moods and to assess the quality of the service offered by Company G, Company A has survived a sample of Company G’s customers. The results are reported in Table 7.

They have asked our consultancy company’s service to understand better the strategy to be adopted. We have to present a plan to lead Company A in exploring costs and benefits of the acquisition as well as different / more efficient solutions.

Questions from the Client

These are the questions asked by the Client to the Consultancy company. Your objective – as a consultant – is not to respond to the questions but, instead, you must propose a consultancy plan to satisfy the Client’s needs behind these questions. Namely, you must propose a plan to step into Company A and satisfy the Client.

  • Is it convenient for Company A to acquire Company G? How much would that cost? Which bargaining power does Company A have?
  • Which are the alternative strategies to the acquisition? How can Company A become more present in universities

Related posts:

  1. Research Project Instructions: Sustainable Development: Research Paper: Each student should identify an area overburdened by pollution, applying EPA’s EJScreen: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (https://www.epa.gov/ejscreen), which combines environmental and socioeconomic information in the area. Then, she needs to write a paper between six and eight pages (including figures, tables, and references). See the required format below. EJSCREEN is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic i
  2. The Assignment: Choose one historical concept about the Dahomey women warriors addressed in Edna Bay’s “Women in Combat,” a review of Stanley B. Alpern’s text Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. Then in a five-page critical analysis – using a Womanist, Afrofuturist framework – that discusse
  3. explain what you see as a key problem or problems with the role of the class action in modern civil litigation. In doing so, make sure you explain how class actions differ from ordinary civil litigation, and create additional challenges.
  4. complete two discussion forums during the course.  Each consists of an initial post of 400-500 words addressing an instructor-provided topic.  The forums also require responses to the posts of at least two classmates. Each response should be 150-300 words.