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Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has emerged as one of the most profitable and prolific companies in the world, generating a market capitalization rate of $623B as of this writing in late August, 2012, delivering $148B in Revenues in their latest fiscal year and $40B in Net Income (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). One of Apple's greatest strengths is its ability to quickly translate innovative product concepts and designs into state-of-the-art products that deliver exceptional customer experiences. Apple has honed this through decades of disciplined execution and a continual focus on creating a highly synchronized supply chain, highly collaborative product design and development workflows, and the ability to take concepts to completed products in a fraction of the time of their competitors (Murray, Goode, Muro, 2010). Apple is credited with creating the smartphone market, tablet PC, cloud-based music buying and delivery service (iTunes), centralized document and image storage (iCloud) and more innovations in operating systems in the last five years than Microsoft (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). All of these accomplishments taken together have led to Apple creating a catalyst of growth in the tablet PC market, fueling a 100%+ increase in iPad sales (13% year over year) and iPhone sales that have increased 152% over the last eighteen months as well (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). Apple continues to accelerate the sales of their iPad, iPhone, iTouch devices in addition to its mainstream laptops and systems. Apple is able to accomplish these significant results by concentrating on the execution of its value chain, a decades-only concept that Dr. Michael Porter originally created to illustrate how the functional departments of a company all must be synchronized to deliver profitability (Porter, 2008). Apple's value chain is exceptionally effective in managing the coordinating of supply chain, sourcing, quality management, production, product design, marketing services, logistics and retailing operations. As long as two decades ago Apple had been concentrating on how to create this level of synchronization across their entire enterprise (Larson, 1994). As the business model of Apple has continually become more complex, the ability of the organization to stay agile and quick to respond has increasingly become more difficult. This is a common problem companies have as they grow in size and complexity of their business models. For Apple, the environmental factors in the areas of economic, social, technological and political change have challenged their ability to grow, and also forced them to create a more market-driven organizational structure, abandoning the highly successful product divisions of the 1990s and early 2000 timeframe (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how Apple is managing to continually grow despite economic, social, technological and political environmental forces impacting their business. In addition, an analysis of their market environment, response to the turbulent economic environment they operate in, the nature of their product strategies, an assessment of their strategic direction and strategic options are all included in this analysis. A separate section is included for each of these areas throughout the analysis. The Porter Fives Forces Model is used for analyzing these market dynamics (Porter, 2008).

Diversifiable risk is specific to a particular asset where undiversifiable risk is the tendency of stock prices to decrease, being caused by something that affects returns on all stocks. The capital asset pricing model is a tool that is used to determine the riskiness of individual assets and the overall portfolio.

Google's strategy is to deliver high quality content that drives advertising revenue online. This strategy is supported by a high level of innovation, by offering end users (web surfers) high value content.

The approval and the disapproval of the whole body imaging technologies incorporated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at all the major airports, has raised fascinating questions about the technology and its utilization of airport scanners. Put into place as a way of escalating the security in the airports, the airport body scanners have the capability to produce high quality images to find metallic or non metallic threats

By the term "free trade" economists refer to an idealized market model, where countries trade their goods or services without being limited and inhibited by tariffs and taxes imposed by governments and non-tariff…

Netflix is the leader in renting DVDs to its customers. When the customer returns one DVD, another is issued. Netflix gained a remarkable success but, on the other, it is facing some of the problems nowadays. Netflix charge a monthly fee from its customers and it has an agreement with the film studios. Due to this agreement, it pays the studios a specific amount from its revenue and this amount is paid on per issue rather than on monthly basis. Since film studios are observing dynamic growth of Netflix, it is likely that they will increase their share rate on per issue and since Netflix charge its customers on monthly basis, it is likely that a decline in its revenue will occur.

Pharmaceutical Industries: Merck & Co., Inc.

¶ … ADVISING for MASTERS & DOCTORAL LEVEL STUDENTS

Physiological and Societal Effects of Smoking

Hewlett-Packard has gone through one of the most significant and successful corporate turn-arounds of any technology-related company in the last ten years. The intention of this paper is to complete a strengths,…