Video Transcript: Business Objectives
Hello, welcome back. In this video, we're going to be discussing business objectives. Okay, different business objectives. Corporations have different motives for how they strategically plan profit maximization is one where corporations look to maximize profit. They want to make sure that marginal cost equals marginal revenue. Anything above what is budgeted or forecast is known as marginal. So we look to increase marginal revenue and marginal cost to make sure that the profit, the revenue that we're bringing in increases our profit maximization. That's what this objective does. Sales revenue maximization, we want to potentially brand our company, get the marketing out there, saturate the market with our branding and our marketing in order to boost our sales revenue, potentially we could cut prices, or maybe reduce our costs, right, to reduce our prices, so that we can maximize sales revenue, undercut the competition in pricing, therefore selling more units, potentially driving higher sales revenue business growth. You want to take market share and continue to grow your business, expand it, and as this happens, you will be able to reinvest more into your business. Therefore, hopefully taking a greater portion of the market share, so a potential or a total sales figure as a percentage of your entire industry will equal your market share. So, a percentage of total sales in your industry, whatever you capture there, is your market share. So, you want to take more market share, a lot of times this happens in infant stages or startup stages, right? You go through the business life cycle, and as you grow, you continue to take more market share, hopefully being able to dominate your space. Business survival, a lot of times firms get in trouble, they over leverage, which means they take on too much debt. They take on too much debt, they have to spend a lot of their free cash flow to pay down that debt, right. So then they become very defensive and become in a survival situation, because their free cash flow is going to pay down debt, and then they're not able to pay out shareholders as much as far as dividends are concerned, or reinvest into their business and grow it, so they turn defensive, and they kind of shift into a survival mode, so to speak, so not for profit, right, their business objectives is to serve the community, right. They want to make sure that services and goods are provided at a cheap cost that are beneficial to consumers, like CLI, offering free high quality ministry training, also the business enterprise for free. So it's a net positive win-win for all the consumers involved, for that, so great example of nonprofit objectives, public sector, state-owned businesses. Right, you see a lot of utilities are state owned, things of that nature, so they are there to maybe make sure that prices don't get out of control and make sure that those sectors are regulated to ensure that consumers are protected, so let's look at the example of profitability in the world airline industry. So, the most profitable airlines in the world in 2014 net profit in billions of US dollars, right? American Airlines 2.9 billion, United Arab Emirates 1.5 Japan Airlines 1.3 and so on, Southwest 1.1 Air China 0.7 and this is in US dollars, right? So you can see that
the net profit of commercial airline worldwide has been very volatile, particularly in 2008 and 2009 Obviously, we were going through turbulent time in American economy, worldwide economy was very shaken in 2009 with the financial collapse, so obviously there wasn't a lot of airline travel, but it has recovered well, and in 2015 it was obviously the most profitable it's been in over 10 years, so it really probably went into defense mode in 2008 They didn't have a lot of free cash flow, right? They were probably having to leverage up to maintain operations, burn through whatever free cash that they might have, instead of distribute. That back to investors, right. So we saw a recovery in 2009 and then a slow incremental recovery through 2015 which it finally broke out. So you can kind of see how different times in the economic cycle, how those positions will shift as far as business executives are concerned, so here we'll talk about market share, right? Market share for handsets, as far as cell phones are concerned. So we want to look at the manufacturers in UK in June 2014 right? So you can see the dominant player at this time in the mobile handset space Samsung dominated at 31.8 with Apple at 22.9 Well, in 2018 I think that this probable market share has probably reversed, right? Apple's overtaken Samsung, and then we've got Nokia, Sony, HTC, all battling it out for the bottom rung of market share, so you've seen Apple really aggressively change their iPhones, you've seen how they've kind of adopted the Samsung model with bigger screens and a higher quality phone, better protection cybersecurity wise, then the Samsung, so you can see how Apple innovated and took market share from Samsung, and is now the leader in that space. So some reasons for different objectives, managerial objectives, revenue or sales growth, instead of profit maximization, right? Maybe profit, profit maximization is down the line for them somewhere, right? So they really need to grow their revenues, they really need to grow their sales, so they're going to increase cost during this time, but they may be able to take that investment, turn it into a return later down the line through greater profit margin. Okay, achieve a satisfactory profit or return for shareholders, right? So now they've now they've gained their profits, right now we're able to reinvest or return the dividends back to the shareholders. So information failures, bounded rationality, lack of accurate information on marginal costs and revenue. So maybe we aren't reporting accurately, maybe there's a breakdown or failure in how our metrics are being broadcast across the firm, so we may not have the right information, so we may not be able to maximize our profit potential through marginal cost and revenue, and they may not equal, therefore that is not maximized cost plus pricing. Okay, variable profit is a common tactic, right? So they want to make sure that we have the average cost plus they're going to price in the variable profit, right? So that way we're going to give them a base price plus the profit baked into the price, so therefore we're maximizing our profit potential through breaking in that variable profit margin, and if marginal cost and marginal revenue are equal, that variable profit
will be maximized. Many small firms are lifestyle businesses for owners, so we've got small businesses, startups, right? So it's a sole proprietorship. I have full control, but I have full risk, right? And I run my life based around this particular business, whatever it may be. So that is kind of what I do. This is my sole proprietorship. This is I'm the single owner, I'm the manager, I have a few employees, and that's a lifestyle business. State-owned corporations, state owned corporations are likely to have a range of different economic, social and political objectives to serve the consumer, to look over the welfare for the citizens, so state owned corporations will try to allocate resources most effectively to ensure that citizens are provided for, so reasons for sales revenue maximization. The objective of maximizing sales revenue rather than profits was developed by economist William Baumol, whose work focused on the decisions of manager-controlled businesses, his research found that annual salary, salaries, and perks were more closely linked to sales revenue than operating profits. Companies geared toward maximizing revenue are likely to make frequent use of price discrimination to extract extra revenue and marginal profit from consumers, so we can go back to adding in the variable profit to the average cost, and we can bake in that cost through, and this is known as price discrimination, so we can extract the revenue and the marginal profit from consumers through price discrimination. Right, a business might also aim to maximize sales revenue rather than profits to deter the entry of new rivals into an industry. Right, so maximize sales instead of profits. You want to dominate the space, take as much sales revenue, as much market share as you can, right. And then they can see that you're the dominant player, and that may deter new entrants from entering your market, right. And maybe taking share away from you, so that you can prove to the market that you have it essentially dominated. You may deter them right, so they don't want to compete with you. If a firm decides to aim to maximize sales revenue rather than profits, one consequence can be a reduction in the value of the firm's shares, since the rate of profits are likely to be lower. So investors and shareholders, they want profit maximization because they want to have that free cash flow return back to them through dividends, right? So they want to maximize profit, so that can be added to the bottom line on owner's equity, and then distributed back through, and as far as dividends, so through dividends they can, you know, so investors obviously want them to have greater profit because they'll have free, greater free cash flow, so they can return that dividend. Number of worldwide active Amazon customer accounts from 1997 to 2014 Now you can see the exponential growth over that 17 year period, and it's continuing to grow exponential today as they are becoming a major conglomerate across all industries, essentially. So they're trying to take share and a lot of diversified industries in order to grow revenues, grow profit, and also spread out risk from any one industry. Right, so Amazon is one of the biggest e-tailers in the world, with a global reach and scope. Amazon
is an international e-cursed company, e-commerce company offering online retail computing services, consumer electronics, digital content, as well as other local services, such as daily deals and groceries. So, just kind of a recap of who Amazon is, so you can see how their accounts have grown, right? So, that has translated into billions and billions and billions of dollars in sales revenue, right, and Amazon does a very good job of staying lean and controlling their costs, so their marginal cost and marginal revenue are very close to equilibrium. I would say as much as you possibly can be. They have some really great management. So, here are the different ranges of the range of business objectives, so let's look at profit maximization, right, maximizing revenue, sales growth, market power, right, social aims. How are they going to help the welfare of the community, reputation, right? They want to improve the reputation with the community, business survival, we talked about being defensive, improve cash flow, right. We want to maximize profitability, right. So, therefore, we'll have more cash to either reinvest in the business, pay down debt, or distribute back to shareholders. Different managerial aims, there may be different goals for different managers, right, so they have different conflicts on how to run the business, but hopefully they can come to a resolution increasing returns on equity, right? So they want to make sure that they are getting the most out of their dollar in their operation. Okay, so these are just different business objectives. So most commercial businesses are profit-seeking, but they are not profit maximizers. Okay, satisfying is the, is probably the most common approach that businesses take across markets. Objectives affect the conduct of firms in markets, and this affects outcomes in terms of economic efficiency, actual and potential threats from commercial rivals is important in the behavior of businesses in real-world contestable imperfect markets. Increasingly, firms are given more emphasis to social value, as well as to narrow measures of shareholder return, businesses have social dimension, so all of these things overall, they companies are looking to implement their strategy to meet their goals, meet their objectives, right, whatever those different objectives may be, right, so overall, those aims are going to be the driver for the outlook of the company, and what they look to move forward with in the future, and how they will continue to compete in the market. So, again, the key concepts we'll run through them. Profit maximization: profits are maximized at an output where marginal cost equals marginal revenue. Revenues are maximized at an output where marginal revenue equals zero, producing the largest amount possible, consistent with earning normal profits. Is sales maximization is satisficing, satisficing involves the owners of a business, shareholders setting minimum acceptable levels of achievement in terms of revenue and profit. Businesses with profits reinvested for social aims, profit people in the planet are social enterprises.