Creating new growth platforms

Sooner or later, most companies can't attain the growth rates expected by their boards and CEOs and demanded by investors. To some extent, such businesses are victims of their own successes. Many were able to sustain high growth rates for a long time because they were in high-growth industries. But once those industries slowed down, the businesses could no longer deliver the performance that investors had come to take for granted. Often, companies have resorted to acquisition, though this strategy has a discouraging track record. Over time, 65% of acquisitions destroy more value than they create. So where does real growth come from? For the past 12 years, the authors have been researching and advising companies on this issue. With the support of researchers at Harvard Business School and Insead, they instituted a project titled "The CEO Agenda and Growth". They identified and approached 24 companies that had achieved significant organic growth and interviewed their CEOs, chief strategists, heads of R&D, CFOs, and top-line managers. They asked, "Where does your growth come from?" and found a consistent pattern in the answers. All the businesses grew by creating new growth platforms (NGPs) on which they could build families of products and services and extend their capabilities into multiple new domains. Identifying NGP opportunities calls for executives to challenge conventional wisdom. In all the companies studied, top management believed that NGP innovation differed significantly from traditional product or service innovation. They had independent, senior-level units with a standing responsibility to create NGPs, and their CEOs spent as much as 50% of their time working with these units. The payoff has been spectacular and lasting. For example, from 1985 to 2004, the medical devices company Medtronic grew revenues at 18% per year, earnings at 20%, and market capitalization at 30%.     

GPs as firms: Creating an internal market for primary care

Outsiders are often amazed at the lack of contact and communication between general practitioners and other members of the primary care team on the one hand, and the rest of the national health service on the other. One way to help close the gap and improve services generally would be to provide GPS with appropriate incentives.     

Future space. A new blueprint for business architecture

Although the Internet is an essential conduit for many business activities, it isn't rendering the physical world any less important, as the failures of many Web merchants demonstrate. People need social and sensual contact. The companies that succeed will be those best able to integrate the physical and the virtual. But that requires a new kind of business architecture--a new approach to designing stores, offices, factories, and other spaces where business is conducted. The author, a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Design, provides practical guidelines to help managers and entrepreneurs think creatively about the structures in which their businesses operate. He outlines four challenges facing designers of such "convergent" structures, so-called because they function in both physical and virtual space: matching form to function, allowing visitors to visualize the presence of others, personalizing spaces, and choreographing connectivity. Using numerous examples, from a fashion retailer that wants to sell in stores as well as through a Web site to a radically new kind of consulate, the author shows how businesses can meet each challenge. For instance, allowing customers to visualize the presence of others means that visitors to a Web site should be given a sense of other site visitors. Personalizing physical and virtual spaces involves using databases to enable those spaces to adapt quickly to user preferences. The success of companies attempting to merge on-line and traditional operations will depend on many factors. But without a well-designed convergent architecture, no company will fully reap the synergies of physical space and Internet technology.     

Product market advertising and new equity issues

We analyze the interaction between a firm's product market advertising and its corporate financing decisions. We consider a firm that faces asymmetric information in both the product and financial markets and that needs to raise external financing to fund its growth opportunity (new project). Any product market advertising undertaken by the firm is visible to the financial market as well. In equilibrium, the firm uses a combination of product market advertising, equity underpricing, and underfinancing (raising a smaller amount of external capital than the full information optimum) to convey its true product quality and the intrinsic value of its projects to consumers and investors. The following two predictions arise from our theoretical analysis for the relation between product market advertising and equity underpricing around new equity issues. First, firms choose a higher level of product market advertising when they are planning to issue new equity, compared with situations in which they have no immediate plans to do so. Second, product market advertising and equity underpricing are substitutes for a firm issuing new equity. We empirically test the above two predictions and find supporting evidence in the context of firms making initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings.     

TAGAL:塑造现代钢铁企业新形象

<正>拥有40万员工、曾以"鞍钢宪法" 而闻名国内的鞍钢集团,是中国最大的钢铁企业。蒂森克虏伯,世界500强企业之一。     

Modelling the behaviour of the new issue market

This paper analyses the time series behaviour of the initial public offering (IPO) market using an equilibrium model of demand and supply that incorporates the number of new issues, average underpricing, and general market conditions. Model predictions include the existence of serial correlation in both the number of new issues and the average level of underpricing, as well as interactions between these variables and the impact of general market conditions. The model is tested using 40 years of monthly IPO data. The empirical results are generally consistent with predictions.     

The new rules for bringing innovations to market

It's tough to get consumers to adopt innovations--and it's getting tougher all the time. That's because more and more markets are taking on the characteristics of networks. The interconnections among today's companies are so plentiful that often a new product's adoption by one player depends on its systematic adoption by other players. Consider the disparate companies involved with the popularization of digital photography: software vendors, camera manufacturers, broadband communications companies, printer manufacturers, and so on. By contrast, Kodak was pretty much the sole player involved with popularizing film photography. The traditional levers executives use to launch products--such as targeting unique customer segments or developing compelling value propositions--don't work as well in this new environment. Instead, innovators must orchestrate a change of behaviors across the market, unraveling the status quo so that a large number of players adopt their offerings and believe they are better off for having done so. In this article, Monitor Group's Bhaskar Chakravorti outlines a four-part framework for doing just that. The innovator must reason back from a target endgame, implementing only those strategies that maximize its chances of getting to its goal. It must complement power players, positioning its innovation as an enhancement to their products or services. The innovator must offer coordinated switching incentives to three core groups: the players that add to the innovation's benefits, the players that act as channels to adopters, and the adopters themselves. And it must preserve flexibility in case its initial strategy fails. Chakravorti uses Adobe's introduction of its Acrobat software as an example of an innovator that took into account other players in the network--and succeeded because of it.     

The market speed of adjustment to new information

A definition of market adjustment is proposed in terms of the time it takes market attributes to reflect new information. Properties of the proposed definition are discussed. In order to operationalize the concept, a statistical method is introduced to estimate the adjustment times. Empirical examples are used to illustrate the proposed method. Some possible economic interpretations are given. The properties of the estimator are also investigated by simulation and analytical methods.     

首创:打造水务市场新模式

建设生态文明是当前社会各界都十分关注并致力于实现的目标,水环境治理是其中非常重要的一部分。水资源的日趋匮乏已成为影响各国经济发展和社会安定的战略性问题,快速发展的工业、农业和增长的人口等因素造成了我国日益严峻的用水短缺,对中国的可持续发展提出了严峻的挑战。因此,21世纪被称为“水的世纪”。而被称为中国领跑城市水业投资的明星企业——首创股份则在这一领域作出了成功的示范,自上市以后的8年来,首创股份专注于城市供水和污水处理两大领域,致力于满足人类对洁净用水和清新环境的渴望,利用其强大的资源优势和融资能力带领了中国水务市场的发展,打造了水务市场的新型运作模式,为社会的可持续发展做出了贡献。那么,首创股份是如何瞄准水务市场的？又是如何运作的？其运作模式有什么特色之处？     

High frequency trading and the new market makers

This paper characterizes the trading strategy of a large high frequency trader (HFT). The HFT incurs a loss on its inventory but earns a profit on the bid–ask spread. Sharpe ratio calculations show that performance is very sensitive to cost of capital assumptions. The HFT employs a cross-market strategy as half of its trades materialize on the incumbent market and the other half on a small, high-growth entrant market. Its trade participation rate in these markets is 8.1% and 64.4%, respectively. In both markets, four out of five of its trades are passive i.e., its price quote was consumed by others.     

初探公司债券市场发展的新契机

股权分置改革完成后,我国的资本市场得到极大的发展。公司债券’市场也面临着全新的发展环境,2007年中国证监会正式发布《实施公司债券发行试点办法》。本文基于新的经济发展形势,探讨公司债券市场发展的必要性、可行性,进而提出发展公司债券市场的建议。     

Efficient market hypothesis and fraud on the market theory a new perspective for class actions

Following recent judgment of the Supreme Court of US (June 2014), several commentators had declared that “Securities class actions are here to stay” (insidecounsel.com—September 2014, 11). This paper provides a critical perspective on this judgment, which “implicates substantive issues at the intersection of economic theory, financial markets, and securities regulation” (128Harv. L. Rev. 291 2014–2015, 291), and shows that we must be much more careful. This recent judgment is based on the Fraud on the Market Doctrine, which was introduced in 1973 in order to preserve the class action procedure in securities fraud litigation. The characteristic of the Fraud on the Market Doctrine is to have been structured from one of the most popular financial theory: Efficient Market Hypothesis. In this paper, by analysing the implementation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis in Fraud on the Market Theory, we argue that if the Supreme Court had to take position for a second time about the Fraud on the Market Doctrine it is due to the practical difficulties inherited from Efficient Market Hypothesis and that have raised several problems to the US courts, including the Supreme Court. This issue is illustrated by the definition of Efficient Market Hypothesis lawyers used (“most” vs “all”/“fully”). As this paper shows, if “Securities class actions are here to stay”, the opportunity to open such a class action is strongly reduced in the facts.     

On investment banker monitoring in the new issues market

This article primarily addresses two largely unanswered questions in the financial economics literature: (i) is there a demand for lead bank monitoring in the initial public offering (IPO) market?, and (ii) does monitoring by the lead investment banker lead to better post-issue performance? We find evidence consistent with the demand for underwriter monitoring in the IPO market. We examine variables which proxy for the incentives of lead underwriters to supply monitoring post-issue. These variables include lead investment bank reputation and whether warrants are issued to the underwriter by the issuing firm. We find that lead bank reputation is positively associated with the post-issue performance of IPO firms. We also examine whether additional value added monitoring is provided by unaffiliated analysts. The number of unaffiliated analysts following is positively correlated with post-issue performance. Our results are consistent with third party monitoring in the new issues market.     

日立数据:寻找存储新空间

2006年3月2日，日移数据（HDS）在北京召开媒体沟通会，HDS中国区总经理柯愈强回顾了2005财年业绩，介绍了HDS在中国的情况，发布了2006财年业务发展策略。     

Managing activity and expenditure in the new NHS market

The English National Health Service is introducing ‘Payment by Results’ so that hospitals are paid according to the activity they undertake. This should encourage hospitals to increase activity but perhaps to unaffordable levels. Drawing on interviews with NHS staff and documentary evidence, the authors examine local strategies to manage activity and NHS expenditure. These alone cannot be relied upon to control expenditure, and payments themselves should be modified.     

新三板市场IPO功能展望

在当前中国的制度体系中,IPO即意味着上市,上市就只能是在证券交易所挂牌。这是一种错误的观念。正确的理解应该是：在场外交易市场挂牌也是“上市”,在场外交易市场挂牌之前也可以IPO。     

Changing conditions in the Hong Kong new issues market

This paper examines the Hong Kong IPO market from August 1995 to July 1999 and finds that the time of the June 30 1997 political handover coincides with the transition in the IPO market from ‘hot’ to ‘cold’. Although the handover was an anticipated event, an explanation for the change in market is that the political handover created uncertainty among investors; a type of information asymmetry where all investors faced greater uncertainty. Our finding provides empirical support to literature which proposes that events in the months preceding the October 27 1997 correction in Asian stock markets facilitated a decline in confidence in financial markets, subsequently characterised as the ‘Asia Financial Crisis’. In addition, we find initial returns of newly listed stocks in the Hong Kong market are associated with market condition but not associated with any particular industry (i.e., PROPERTY) or geographic location (i.e., ‘H’ SHARES) suggesting that the prevailing market condition was spread more generally across issues.     

引领电子支付市场POS“老兵”再续传奇

从几万到几十万,这绝不是简单的数字跨越,它见证了一个企业的快速健康发展。     

Global work force 2000: the new world labor market

Just as there are global markets for products, technology, and capital, managers must now think of one for labor. Over the next 15 years, human capital, once the most stationary factor in production, will cross national borders with greater and greater ease. Driving the globalization of labor is a growing imbalance between the world's labor supply and demand. While the developed world accounts for most of the world's gross domestic product, its share of the world work force is shrinking. Meanwhile, in the developing countries, the work force is quickly expanding as many young people approach working age and as women join the paid work force in great numbers. The quality of that work force is also rising as developing countries like Brazil and China generate growing proportions of the world's college graduates. Developing nations that combine their young, educated workers with investor-friendly policies could leapfrog into new industries. South Korea, Taiwan, Poland, and Hungary are particularly well positioned for such growth. And industrialized countries that keep barriers to immigration low will be able to tap world labor resources to sustain their economic growth. The United States and some European nations have the best chance of encouraging immigration, while Japan will have trouble overcoming its cultural and language barriers.     

五款新品同时亮相联想重拳出击行业大客户市场

2005年12月，联想宣布在全国范围内展开历时一个月，题为“创新、跨越，蓄势新起点”的联想中国客户模式岁末新品巡展活动。此次联想一举推出五款新品，有专为军工、政府等对信息安全有特殊要求的行业用户设计的安全笔记本昭阳E660PT和安全PC开天M400S；专为对移动、便携有特殊需求的商务人士设计的两款宽屏笔记本电脑昭阳E370、昭阳S650，以及稳定可靠、平衡扩展的新一代开天产品——开天B系列。巡展覆盖了北京、沈阳、西安、成都、广州、深圳、武汉、杭州、南京、济南等重点城市。此次巡展展示了联想强大的产品研发实力以及贴近客户应用需求的核心产品理念。可以预计，联想的岁末巡展必将给平淡的PC市场注入一针强心剂，并充分展示出新联想的实力。