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Essay Instructions: Answer BOTH questions

1. You are the owner of a small / medium sized business looking to extend its reach into new markets. The business could be an existing Bricks & Mortar Organisation but does not preclude Start-Up operations. The markets can be either local or international but positioning should be stated within the report. Using your knowledge of themes in the e-Business landscape, provide a structured report to assist with the development of the business to make best use available technologies.


You must produce a report that describes how the business will work. How will it manage its customers? How does it manage its suppliers? How does it make sure it is found by potential customers? How does it make money etc?
The industrial focus of the business must be stated and in addition be chosen from the following list: Retail Clothes Manufacturer, Automotive Manufacturer, Business Consultancy, Leisure & Tourism, Hospitality and the Entertainment Sector.

The expansion of the business is key to its survival and some thought to the expected benefits in time, cost etc. should be explored.

You are free to make any reasonable assumption you wish about the company, as long as you state what they are in your answer.

You will not need to talk about the actual hardware/technical solution used since that will be decided by other consultants. You must just focus on the basic business operating principles ensuring that the business makes the best use of the internet. Note that when you talk about an e-business concept you must describe what it is, how it works, what advantages and disadvantages it bring and how this company will use it. You may use examples from other businesses to make your explanations clearer. [50 marks]

2. Review the developments in mobile communication devices and highlight how they can be used to promote and improve information flow within a Global e-Business. [20 marks]

NOTE: There is a general rule in academic writing in that every fact should be supported by evidence that it is true. This is so other authors can build on your work with confidence. If things are stated that are not supported then they cannot be used in later argument. There are of course some places where presenting evidence is not necessary and these are things that are directly observable and common knowledge. For instance you can say “The sky is blue” and not have to give a reference but if you say “The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering” or “the sky is blue with wavelength of X” then you would need to refer to the paper that told you these facts. So please make sure that you use your sources correctly.

You also need to be critical. Just making statement of fact will get you few marks. You need to discuss what these facts mean and extract greater more generic truths from them.

Additional requirement
You have to answer both question, For question 1 is required around 3900-4000 words and question 2 is required around 1400-1500 words
You can make the assumption when it related to the information
Font arial size 11, 1.5 spacing
Use British English
Harvard Reference List is required
I prefer the source and reference from journal and article.

Essay Instructions: You are to write a 3-page paper. ‘State the Question First and then continue to answer.’ Read the Case Study, and at the end of the Case Study Answer the Discussion Questions. *Do Not Use Outside Sources.*

Qualcomm in China

Company and Industry Background

QUALCOMM was founded in 1985 by Dr. Irwin Jacobs, a former engineer professor. Under Jacobs, leadership, the company developed a digital communications technology for wireless phones known as code division multiple access (CDMA). Introduced in 1989, CDMA became one of the three main technologies used in digital wireless phones. CDMA and the two other digital wireless communication technologies, TDMA (which stands for Time division multiple access) and GSM (which is a form of TDMA and stands for global system for mobile communications), are the digital technologies used to transmit a wireless phone users voice or data over radio waves using the wireless phone operator’s network. CDMA works by converting speech into digital information, which is being transmitted in the form of a radio signal over the phone network. These digital wireless phone networks are complete phone systems comprised primarily of base stations, or “cells,” which are geographically placed throughout the service more coverage area. Once communication between a wireless phone user and a base station is established, the system detects the movement of the wireless phone user and the communications is handed off to another base station, or cell, as the wireless phone user moves throughout the service area.
QUALCOMM has more than 800 patents on CDMA, and essentially owns this standard for digital wireless phones. The company licenses its technology to equipment manufacturers in return for royalties on the cell of any equipment, such as base stations and handsets. The equipment manufacturers sell the equipment and service providers. Thus, for example, QUALCOMM might license its technology to Motorola, which then makes base stations and handsets that are based on CDMA technology. In turn, Motorola might sell the CDMA equipment to a service provider, such as Verizon, which offers wireless phone service to consumers in the United States. Every time Motorola makes a sale, QUALCOMM collects a royalty based on a percentage of the price of that equipment (QUALCOMM has not reported that figure, but it is believed to be 4 percent of the value of the equipment). QUALCOMM also makes and sells “chipsets” based on CDMA technology to equipment manufacturers who then place those chipsets into base stations and handsets. Some 90% of CDMA phones contain chipsets manufactured by QUALCOMM. In 2004, QUALCOMM generated record revenues of $4.88 billion and net profits of $1.72 billion.
The great advantage claimed for CDMA over competing standard is that it uses radio spectrum more efficiently than GSM or TDMA. QUALCOMM states that CDMA equipment has three times the capacity of comparable GSM or TDMA equipment, thereby enabling service operators to attain the same capacity with a lower investment in network equipment such as base stations. Because the wireless service and dish tree is very price competitive, and technology that promises to lower-cost service operation should gain an advantage in the marketplace. However, CDMA was a latecomer to the digital communication market and by 2004 still in third place behind TDMA and GSM with 26 percent of the world market a big reason for this was that in the early 1990s, the European Union backed GSM as the standard for digital communication technology. At the time, Europe led the world in the adoption of wireless phone technology. Since European firms such as Ericsson and Nokia were major suppliers of GSM equipment, this decision benefited them.
Although CDMA equipment can, in theory, handle more data traffic than comparable TDMA or GSM equipment, the larger installed base of TDMA and GSM subscribers mean that a company making this equipment benefit from substantial economies of scale, which to some extent nullifies a cost advantage associated with CDMA technology and helps explain the continued dominance of the standards. Also, since far more GSMA handsets are so than CDMA handsets, economies of scale mean that GSM handsets are less expensive than CDMA handsets. By the end of 2004 there were over 1.6 million wireless subscribers worldwide, some 340 million of which used CDMA technology. Forecasts called for the total number of wireless subscribers to grow to 2.5 billion by 2009. Among the wireless technologies, CDMA was mentioning the fastest growing rate. CDMA is now the most widely used technology and United States, where 47% of the nation's 160 million wireless phone subscribers in 2004 used CDMA equipment. CDMA also has a large and growing presence in Latin America and the Asian Pacific region. The laggard in CDMA penetration is Europe, where GSM dominates and CDMA technology had less than 10 million subscribers in 2002.
Looking forward, the success of the QUALCOMM will be driven by two related factors. First, there is a shift to a new generation of technology, known in the industry as 3G or third-generation wireless technology. This new generation of digital wireless technology is designed to handle much greater amounts of data at rapid download speeds, enabling subscribers to download multimedia applications, such as streamline video or audio, on to their wireless phones, effectively turning the handsets into small computers that are able to access the Internet from any place any time. Two versions of CDMA technology have been developed for 3G, CDMA 2000 and WCDMA. While QUALCOMM developed CDMA 2000, WCDMA was developed by rival telecommunications firms Nokia and Ericsson. However, QUALCOMM's patents cover both versions of technology and the firm will earn royalties no matter which version is used by a particular service carrier, although QUALCOMM favors CDMA 2000 and reportedly makes greater royalties from it. Both CDMA 3G technologies will have to compete with a 3G version of the popular GSM technology, known as GPRS, which was introduced in 2002.
The second factor driving QUALCOMM's success is the penetration of CDMA technology into developing markets where there's still a large potential for new subscriber adoptions, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Industry forecasts suggest a number of wireless phones drivers in this region will grow from 232 million in 2000 to 780 million in 2005. Top among these expanding developing markets are China, with its 1.2 billion people, and India, with nearly 1 billion. In both nations, wireless penetration is currently low but growing rapidly. Forecasts suggest by 2009 there will be 550 million wireless subscribers in China, up from 250 million in 2003, and 117 million India, from less than 30 million in 2003. Given the large population base in these markets, the standard that dominates there may be the standard that dominates worldwide. China and India have thus become the main battlegrounds for the future of digital wireless technology, and QUALCOMM's future depends critically upon the outcome of this battle.

The Early Days: Great Wall
QUALCOMM's Irwin Jacobs was quick to recognize the importance of China and QUALCOMM's future. He began making business trips to China in 1992 to try to persuade China's fledgling telecommunication provider to adopt CDMA technology. In 1994 and it began to look as if he might make some headway. At the time, China's army was keen to develop a secure communication network. CDMA is well-suited to the application because it was adapted from a technology developed for secure military transmissions. The Chinese army also owned a spectrum that CDMA uses, the 800 MHz band. By building a commercial CDMA network with its spare spectrum, the army believed it could dominate the nascent mobile phone market in China, and use the profits and expertise gained from that business to modernize its own communications network. When the army announced in 1994 that it would deploy a CDMA network, China's top telephone official, Wu Jichuan, the minister of Posts and Telecommunications, was caught somewhat off guard. Wu Jichuan saw telecommunications as a national priority and favored state-owned China telecommunication Corp. He had allowed the company to charge high long-distance rates, and in hand forced into use the profits to bring telecommunication services to remote villages. He had little use for competition that might sap China Telecommunication’s profits and derail his plans. To deal with the threat, the canny Wu invited the army into his camp, proposing that form 50/50 joint venture with China Telecommunications to build a CDMA network. Called “Great Wall,” the venture won a license to run an experimental CDMA network in four cities; creating a potential boom in demand for CDMA equipment and a royalty stream for QUALCOMM. However, Wu ordered China Telecommunications to roll out as fast as possible a separate, nationwide digital network based on GSM. The Ministry of Post and Telecommunications happened to own the 900 MHz radio spectrum used by the GSM technology. Wu refused to issue permits to the army to allow it to expand its network beyond four cities. By 1998 it was clear that the Great Wall’s expansion plan has been stymied by Wu, with a corresponding loss of opportunity for QUALCOMM.
China Unicom
However, the story was far from over. In the late 1990s, China separated out to wireless phone operators from China telecommunications, China mobile and China Unicom. Although both were initially state owned, the idea was still some team to private investors and set two entities up as competitors in China's wireless phone market. While China mobile inherited from bulk of existing networks and subscribers, China Unicom was left to choose its own technology, opening the door for QUALCOMM to get back into China. Irwin Jacobs had also been working the political angle in the interim. China's leader decided in the late 1990s that it needed to become a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) if it wants to participate in the global economy of the 21st-century. If China was to enter the World Trade Organization, it would have to win the support of major trading nations who were already members, including the United States. Behind the scenes, Jacobs lobbied the US government, urging it to pressure China to adopt CDMA technology as one of the conditions for US support of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. For a while the efforts were fruitless, but in March 1999 the Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji decided to the United States commitment to use CDMA technology in return for US support in China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Zu propose that China Unicom work with QUALCOMM and others to roll out a CDMA network in China.
However, before this deal could be finalized, QUALCOMM and negotiate a licensing framework with Wu’s ministry, which had been renamed the Ministry of information. But the negotiations dragged on, with QUALCOMM demanding a higher royalty rate on sales of CDMA equipment than Wu ordered Unicom to negotiate directly with QUALCOMM. Unicom was trying to become profitable so that it can start selling at team to private investors and gain a listing on the Hong Kong and New York stock exchanges. It had already started to roll out a wireless network based on GSM and was not happy about being ordered to make duplicate investments in a CDMA network. Reports suggest that like Wu, Unicom insisted that QUALCOMM lower its royalty rates or nothing would happen. QUALCOMM relented (the royalty agreement has not been made public), and in February 2000 Unicom announced that a deal had been reached and it would soon start construction on a CDMA network for 10 million subscribers.
The issue was far from resolved, however. At the signing ceremony it was clear that something was wrong Wu and other Cabinet officials declined to attend. In a private meeting between Wu Jichuan and Jacobs it became clear why Wu Jichuan was insisting that QUALCOMM must transfer the design for the chips that run the CDMA system to a Chinese firm. QUALCOMM had never done this and was unlikely to do so. Jacobs said the request could not be met. A few days later China Unicom withdrew its request for bids on a CDMA network, but denied that the project was on hold. In June 2000, after the US House of Representatives approved a bill enabling China to enter the World Trade Organization, China Unicom confirmed it would continue to use a GSM network, the Company held out the possibility that it would use 3G equipment based on CDMA.
According to news reports, while politics played a part in the Unicom decision, Soviet pressure from the local equipment manufacturers, many of whom were joint ventures between Chinese companies and foreigners, such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola. Many of these joint ventures had already made investments to produce GSM equipment and were not ready to produce CDMA equipment. Some of these manufactures reportedly pressuring Unicom to stick with GSM or, the very least, slow down the rollout of CDMA networks. After so many years trying to break into China, Jacobs was not about to give up. In October 2000 and Jacobs visited Premier Zu Rongji in Beijing. What went on in that meeting is not known, but it is speculated that QUALCOMM lowered the royalty rate and Chinese women manufacturers would have to pay the company to 2.65 percent of handset sales, substantially lower than the 4 percent rate reportedly paid QUALCOMM elsewhere in the world. Soon after the meeting, China Unicom reversed course, announcing that it will build a CDMA network to support 10 million subscribers although it would now be mid-2002 before the network started to generate significant handset sales, and thus royalties for QUALCOMM, not 2001 as originally hoped. Analysts speculated that the small size of the network would make it hard for QUALCOMM to get its favored 3G technology, CDMA 2000, widely adopted in China. My 2001 looked as if QUALCOMM had finally cracked the Chinese market. Then, one day before China Unicom was due to sign contracts with equipment suppliers to supply its planned CDMA network, the deal was delayed again. No reason was given. Some speculated that a rising political tension between United States and China was to blame. As US surveillance plane had been forced down by Chinese air force, which accused United States spying on China. Thrown into the mix were heightened tensions between United States and China over the future of Taiwan. A month later Chinese President Jiang Zemin appeared to give the green light to the deal when he told a gathering of foreign business leaders that CDMA could increase competition in China. Shortly after, Unicom sign contracts to build a CDMA network with a capacity of 15.15 million subscribers.
The Rollout of CDMA In China
After years of stop and go, China Unicom turned on its CDMA network in January 2002 following a $2.5 billion investment in equipment. It year-end target for 2002 was 7 million subscribers, but by June 2002 the number stood as a meager 700,000, while China overall and 160 million wireless subscribers, the majority using GSM equipment. Critics were quick to claim that slow rollout demonstrated Unicom's lack of commitment to CDMA, which some view as being forced on them by Chinese politicians. Unicom executives disagreed, and claimed the decision was a sound business decision made because CDMA network equipment is cheaper than GSM equipment. Unicom and QUALCOMM executives did concede that they had priced CDMA phones to high in an attempt to recoup the higher cost of CDMA handsets, which cost $350 each, some $100 more than GSM phones. By the second half of 2002, however, the rollout of CDMA service accelerated. In October 2002, China Unicom reported that it had more than 4 million CDMA subscribers, and that it was encountering rapid growth and should hit 7 million by year end. By February 2005, China Unicom in almost 20 9 million CDMA subscribers. In the same time, subscriptions to its GSM networks were also growing. At the end of 2004, China Unicom hand 112 million subscribers in China. Meanwhile, QUALCOMM continue to show its commitment to China. The company opened a 43,000 square-foot research Center in China in 2002 to focus on the development of 3G CDMA technology and applications for the Chinese market, and in June 2003 the company announced it would invest $100 million in Chinese equipment companies to help them develop CDMA equipment. Jacobs also predicted that looking forward to 3G rollout in China, China Unicom would move its network to CDMA 2000, while China mobile would adopt WCDMA technology. Either way, QUALCOMM would benefit.

Discussion Questions

1.Why does GSM have a larger share of wireless subscribers worldwide?

2.To what extent do political decisions explain the global leadership of GSM?

3.To what extent do economic factors?

4.Are the economic and political factors independent of each other?

Essay Instructions: Dear Essay Town,
Following is my request: analyze/review the article from the economist (copied below) in 3 pages. Emphasize the fact that the portion of GDP spent on healthcare is not a problem if society adequately benefits from it and everyone has access to it, then discuss ways in which the healthcare system is inefficient and wasteful in America, using the following article (and other articles you may have):

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=1145

and this summary information about this harvard business review article: Harv Bus Rev. 2004 Jun;82(6):64-76, 136.
Redefining competition in health care.
Porter ME, Teisberg EO.
Harvard University, Harvard Business School, Boston, USA. mporter@hbs.edu
The U.S. health care system is in bad shape. Medical services are restricted or rationed, many patients receive poor care, and high rates of preventable medical error persist. There are wide and inexplicable differences in costs and quality among providers and across geographic areas. In well-functioning competitive markets--think computers, mobile communications, and banking--these outcomes would be inconceivable. In health care, these results are intolerable, with life and quality of life at stake. Competition in health care needs to change, say the authors. It currently operates at the wrong level. Payers, health plans, providers, physicians, and others in the system wrangle over the wrong things, in the wrong locations, and at the wrong times. System participants divide value instead of creating it. (And in some instances, they destroy it.) They shift costs onto one another, restrict access to care, stifle innovation, and hoard information--all without truly benefiting patients. This form of zero-sum competition must end, the authors argue, and must be replaced by competition at the level of preventing, diagnosing, and treating individual conditions and diseases. Among the authors' well-researched recommendations for reform: Standardized information about individual diseases and treatments should be collected and disseminated widely so patients can make informed choices about their care. Payers, providers, and health plans should establish transparent billing and pricing mechanisms to reduce cost shifting, confusion, pricing discrimination, and other inefficiencies in the system. And health care providers should be experts in certain conditions and treatments rather than try to be all things to all people. U.S. employers can also play a big role in reform by changing how they manage their health benefits.


SURVEY: HEALTH-CARE FINANCE

Money well spent?

Jul 15th 2004
From The Economist print edition
It depends on how you do the sums

DESPITE the prodigious growth in health-care spending over the past 40 years, there have long been nagging doubts over whether it provided value for money. Medical advances such as vaccines and antibiotics against infectious diseases have clearly done much to improve people's health, but these things are relatively cheap. What has all the rest of the spending achieved?

A commonly used gauge of health status is life expectancy. This measure casts doubt on the effectiveness of heavy spending on health care in recent decades on two grounds. First, the biggest increase in life expectancy pre-dated the introduction of national health-care systems. In England and Wales, for example, life expectancy at birth rose by 20 years in the first half of the 20th century, but by only ten years in the second half. The most important reason for the early gain was the conquest of the infectious diseases that were taking such a heavy toll a century ago. But the biggest improvement occurred before the introduction of mass immunisation programmes and antibiotics. It is thought that medical care accounts for only about a fifth of the 20th-century gains in life expectancy in Britain and America. The rest came from improvements in nutrition, sanitation, hygiene and housing.

The second reason to doubt the value of health-care spending emerges from international comparisons. America spends easily the highest proportion of its GDP on medical care, but its people's life expectancy at birth is lower than in many countries with more modest health budgets (see chart 6).

Such comparisons are often used to criticise the American health-care system or to defend stingy medical budgets in other countries. Yet what they really show is that health is a complex matter, with medical care just one contributory factor. Health can be seen as a capital good in which individuals invest not just through spending on medical care but through their own behaviour, for example by cutting out smoking, over-eating and binge-drinking. Living conditions and environmental factors can also affect health.

An influential exponent of this view is Stanford University's Victor Fuchs. In his classic text, ?Who Shall Live??, first published in 1974, he wrote that differences in health levels between America and other developed countries ?are not primarily related to differences in the quantity or quality of medical care. Rather, they are attributable to genetic and environmental factors and to personal behaviour.? He suggested that ?higher income often seems to do as much harm as good to health, so that differences in diet, smoking, exercise, automobile driving and other manifestations of ?lifestyle? have emerged as the major determinants of health.?

Until recently, most health economists were sceptical about the contribution of medical care to general health, says Ted Frech of the University of California, Santa Barbara. A former sceptic himself, he now argues that even allowing for the effect of lifestyles, medical care does make a difference. He is convinced about the value of drugs, especially the cholesterol-lowering statins used to counter cardiovascular disease. His analysis of 18 advanced countries suggests that pill-popping does work: ?Countries that consumed more pharmaceuticals saw their populations live longer and suffer less ill health than those that consumed less.?

William Schwartz of the University of Southern California School of Medicine stresses that medical care delivers more than longer lives. It pays an extra dividend by improving the quality of people's lives, for example through greater mobility, enhanced vision and pain relief. He argues that the cost of such treatments accounts for a considerable part of the spending gap between America and other countries.

At the same time, the quality of treatments has improved by leaps and bounds. New forms of surgery are less invasive and allow swifter recovery. New drug therapies mean that patients receiving heart transplants now spend only ten days at Stanford Hospital, whereas 20 years ago they often stayed two months or longer, says Ms Marsh. Jack Triplett, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cites cataract surgery as an example: ?At one time you had to spend ten days immobilised in intensive care. Now it's done as an outpatient appointment, so not only has quality improved but it takes far less time.?

In a recent book, ?Your Money or Your Life?, David Cutler, an economist at Harvard University, offers some interesting sums on the value of health care. For example, an American aged 45 today will live four-and-a-half years longer than he would have done in 1950 because of a decline in cardiovascular disease. Mr Cutler attributes two-thirds of this increase in life expectancy to better medical care and the remaining third to behavioural changes, such as giving up smoking. Survival rates for low-birth-weight infants have also improved greatly because of medical treatment. These are the two areas where health care has made the biggest difference to mortality in the past 50 years.

What's life worth to you?
People put a high value on living longer: Mr Cutler estimates that an extra year of life is worth $100,000 to an individual. On that basis, he reaches a startling conclusion: that in America ?the benefits of medical advances for these two conditions alone are equal to the entire increase in medical costs in the past half-century.? This finding appears to overturn the conventional wisdom that the value of medical spending is questionable, and to vindicate the vast sums poured into health care.

One difficulty with this kind of analysis is that it does not compare like with like. Costs are real: they have to be met out of workers' incomes, whether through insurance premiums, cash payments or taxes and social-security contributions. In contrast, the valuation of benefits is notional. True, it is derived from solid evidence, such as the amount of money people are prepared to pay for safety features, eg, car airbags, that could save lives in a crash. But this prompts the question: why do so many people take so little care of themselves even though it may cost little or nothing, whereas once they have become ill medical intervention costs such a lot?

Yet this new research underlines an important point: whatever the doubts about the contribution of medicine for much of the past century, it is now doing much more to push up life expectancy. Ahead lies the prospect of even greater gains as advances in the life sciences are translated into innovative therapies. Potential treatments include targeted techniques to combat cancer and tissue engineering to replace failing organs. John Potts, former research director of Massachusetts General Hospital, says that further big increases in life expectancy are ?within the capacity of the scientific knowledge base and medical delivery system if you didn't have to worry about costs?.

But costs should be less of a worry if the gains in health are so highly valued. Mr Cutler has no difficulty in principle with projections in which health spending as a share of the economy continues to grow to, say, 30%. Such a figure may seem outlandish, but the current share of 15% would itself have seemed absurd in 1960, when America's total health expenditure amounted to only 5% of GDP.

There are two major objections to the idea that health care should absorb an ever rising share of national income. If this arose from private choices subject to the constraints of household budgets, all well and good. But as Peter Zweifel, a health economist at Zurich University, points out, this is a market in which governments intervene on a massive scale. Governments, for their part, have to worry about raising taxes, which may slow economic growth.

Secondly, the overriding objective for policymakers, as Mr Fuchs insists, is to ensure that additional money put into health generates commensurate additional gains. Mr Goldman of RAND puts it this way: ?The question is whether medical technologies are effective at the margin. For example, there will be a class of people for whom statins are clearly valuable, but should we put them in the water?? Mr Cutler himself is a fierce critic of many wasteful features of American health care.

These worries are given added weight by a recent accumulation of findings about inefficiency and waste in medical care. Clearly, these problems need to be tackled first before writing a blank cheque for health budgets.