CBAD 478: Strategic Management

Q. How do I find the business strategy for my company?

You'll have to pull together all the information you have about your company to truly understand their business strategy, but you can also look for articles already written about the topic to give you an idea:

Q: What is market share and how do I find it? 

Market share is the percentage of an industry or market's total sales that is earned by a particular company over a specified time period. Market share is calculated by taking the company's sales over the period and dividing it by the total sales of the industry over the same period. 

You can find market share information on your company in two University Libraries databases. 

If your company is a top competitor in an established industry, you may also be able to find its market share by investigating the industry.

Q. Where do I find the subsidiaries of my company?

Q: How do I find my company's Value Chain?

Finding information about your firm's value chain can be tricky for a couple reasons. First, there is no one-stop shop for finding this kind of information, so you will have to look in several places. Second, not every firm will participate in all the "links" in the chain, and this is something you will have to find out. Here are some places to start:

Q: How do I find a Horizontal and Vertical Financial Analysis?

A: Most simply put, horizontal financial analysis involves comparing (in percentage change and absolute dollars) the specific items on financial statements over multiple PERIODS (e.g., for the CBAD 478 projects this has always been years - so how do revenues in 2014 compare to revenues from 2013, 2012, etc.?). For vertical financial analysis, it involves evaluating how much individual components of the respective financial statement occupy a proportion of either total revenues (for the income statement) or total assets (for the balance sheet) and then comparing these percentages across years to identify stability/ or not in these figures. Then this means evaluating what do the results indicate.

For these analysis, you will need to use every item on an income statement and every item on the balance sheet. As business students, you should be familiar with these financial statements. The analyses are ways to compare each item either across time and/or relative to other parts of the respective financial statement.

Q. I need to find inside shareholders (e.g. CEOs, Board of Directors), outside shareholders, and institutional holdings.