As a project for her marketing class, Emily Washington is researching how five local businesses price their products. The following are brief sketches of what she has learned about each company. At Bella Computers, Emily has discovered that the company earned a 6 percent return on investment this year and wants to increase it to 9 percent next year. To its retailer customers, Bella Computers gives cash discount terms of 2/10, net 30. It also gives retailers a 3% reduction on the invoice amount for advertising Bella products locally. Bella gives retailers' salespeople 2% of the sale price for each Bella Computer they sell.
At Ross Pharmaceuticals, she learned that the company has invested heavily in developing a new product that recently received a patent. Because cash is tight, the company wants to achieve a rapid return on its investment. The new patented product is badly needed in the market, so a very inelastic demand curve is expected.
Digital Imaging makes photographic prints for wedding photographers. It is very concerned about competitor reactions to its pricing, so it has selected prices that will not draw the attention of the competition and not start a price war. Digital Imaging offers customers an 8% discount if their purchases exceed $20,000 a year.
Jack's One Hour Cleaners recently opened for business. The company invested a lot of money in new equipment, and feels that it has to quickly get "at least 10% market share to stay in the game." This need obviously influences the company's pricing decisions. Jack's also plans to offer customers 20% discounts on any order over $20.
National Printing Equipment (NPE) produces equipment that helps to print newspapers and magazines. The company sells directly to printers and through wholesalers. Its salespeople negotiate prices with individual customers and often have to match competitors' prices. NPE has a new product, the Gutenberg NP201, with some competitive advantages now, but competitors are expected to follow quickly with similar products. The new product is being introduced into a market with elastic demand. In regard to freight charges for its equipment, NPE's invoice reads, "Seller pays the cost of loading equipment onto a common carrier. At the point of loading, title to such products passes to the buyer, who assumes responsibility for damage in transit, except as covered by the transportation agency."
Bella Computers' pricing objective is best described as:.
A. target return.
B. status quo oriented.
C. profit oriented.
D. sales oriented.
E. None of these is a good answer.

Sabrina gupta, an investment advisor with a major brokerage firm, was examining wal-mart stores, inc. (wal-mart) stock and its valuation. gupta wondered whether to recommend the stock to any of her new clients or to existing clients who did not currently have wal-mart in their portfolios.her key task was to use an intrinsic value approach to price the shares and to then compare the resulting price with the price at which the stock was traded in the market. gupta wanted to use alternative valuation methods and assumptions to produce intrinsic value estimates for wal-mart stock.she was interested in seeing if the alternative methods would point to a consensus regarding the valuation of the stock and to see if the valuations suggested an investment opportunity given the current market price. methods she contemplated to use were: multi-stage growth modelprice earnings multiplemost valuation methods gupta considered required a common set of inputs: future cash flows to wal-mart investorsgrowth rate of future cash flowsdiscount factor or required rate of return by wal-mart investorsgupta gathered data to determine each of the above.gupta thought that dividends to wal-mart shareholders would adequately capture the cash flows to wal-mart shareholders; she also thought that this approach would simplify her task and she would revisit more complex valuation models if she felt the need.gupta thought that capm would provide her a relatively reliable estimate of the required rate of return. capm based required rate of return can be estimated by using a risk free rate, systematic risk of the firm and equity market risk premium. gupta thought that in a valuation exercise that involve long term cash flows, 10-year government bond yield would be an appropriate risk free rate of return estimate. she checked the 10 year note rate and found out that it was about 3.68%. gupta searched for wal-mart beta in bloomberg. bloomberg estimates betas by regressing the s& p 500 returns on the firm returns over the past two years and arrives at a “raw” beta estimate. bloomberg makes an adjustment in raw beta based on some academic research. gupta is confident that bloomberg adjustment is justified and she uses wal-mart beta estimate of 0.66 in her analysis.while gupta is aware of the importance of emrp assumption, she thinks that bloomberg’s historical estimate of 5.05% is a safe assumption. she is aware of the fact that some studies suggest a larger risk premium of approximately six per cent, while others suggest a much lower forward-looking premium of less than four per cent. she is mindful of the arbitrariness of her assumption, and she takes a note to revisit this issue if her valuations produce unreasonable estimates.anticipated dividend growth (g) is often estimated in a variety of ways.first, observed historical dividend growth can be assumed to continue in a perpetual fashion.second, future dividend growth can be estimated on the basis of recent estimates of analysts.gupta noted that the consensus annual wal-mart dividend for fiscal year 2011 was $1.21, and one respected analyst had estimated the expected constant dividend growth (in perpetuity) at approximately 3%.as the chart suggests, both earnings and dividend growth rates are declining but they seem to be higher than the “respected analyst’s” estimates. gupta decides to use several alternative perpetual growth assumptions to see the impact on price. since gupta decided to use variants of dividend discount model (ddm), she checked the anticipated earnings for 2011. analyst’s estimates suggested $4.10 earnings per share. gupta decided to use 10% growth rate from 2011 to 2012 and assumed a steady decline to 3% in 13 years (until 2024) where the perpetual growth rate of 3% resumes. she also assumed that walmart will increase its dividend payout ratio from 30% to 55% from years 2012 to 2024. you are asked to reproduce gupta’s analysis of multi-stage growth model and double check her valuation by using an earnings multiple. you have all the data you need to conduct the multi stage discounted growth model analysis, but you will need to do some research about the multiples valuation.

The undress company produces a dress that women use to quickly and easily change in public. the company is just over a year old and has been successful through a kickstarter campaign. the undress company has identified a customer segment, but if it wants to reach a larger customer segment market outside of the kickstarter family, what question must it answer?

Suppose that two countries, britain and the u.s. produce just one good - beef. suppose that the price of beef in the u.s. is $2.80 per pound, and in britain it is £3.70 per pound. according to ppp theory, what should the $/£ spot exchange rate be? suppose the price of beef is expected to rise to $3.10 in the u.s. and to £4.65 in britain. what should be the one year forward $/£ exchange rate?