Comprehensive Analysis of a Fortune 500 Company HW
Comprehensive Analysis of a Fortune 500 Company HW
For this Individual Project you will analyze publicly available information about a Fortune 500 Company and develop an assessment of the corporate strategy and its ability to increase competitive advantage.
This assignment requires you to obtain and analyze information at the company, industry and market levels using various databases and reports found in Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet, in addition to at least eight (8) professional or academic peer –reviewed articles.
Your analysis should include an in-depth review of the Company’s most recent SEC Form-10k Annual Report and Form DEF-14A Proxy Statement. These SEC filings can be found at the SEC Edgar Database located at the URL http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html . Pay particular attention to the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections of the SEC Form 10-K and the DEF-14A Proxy statement. Direct competitors are identified in the “Comparator Group” section of the DEF-14A Proxy Statement. ) These SEC filings also contain information relative to external and industry analysis that will be helpful in your assessment of the Company’s strategy and competitive position.
A thorough analysis requires evaluation of various external stakeholders:
- Competitors
- Industry
- Vendors
- Customers
- Governmental entities
- Communities
Internal stakeholders that should be considered in the analysis include:
- Shareholders
- Board of Directors
- Management
- Employees
A comprehensive SWOT analysis should be performed relative to the Company’s ability to improve its competitive advantage.
The comprehensive analysis should include both qualitative and quantitative elements, leveraging information available in SEC Filings, business databases, and peer-reviewed articles.
Your work should demonstrate your ability to:
- Apply critical thinking skills to analyze business situations.
- Apply principles of quantitative and qualitative research to business cases.
- Describe the opportunities provided by technology for businesses.
- Appropriately use effective communication techniques.
- Apply the standard of APA style to all research and writing tasks.
You will prepare a report presenting the findings of your comprehensive analysis examining the Company’s corporate strategy and its ability to increase competitive advantage. The written report will have a body length of 10-12 pages excluding title, abstract, references and appendices. Quotation limits should be Not more than 10% of the body of the paper can be quotations, all of which must be properly attributed in APA format.
ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED, PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPERS
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.