Change from the Competitive Landscape

Objectives
Instructor Comments
Assignment

Objectives

The aim of this assignment is to offer learners an example of how the competitive environment can serve as a catalyst for change and how companies signal their understanding of these challenges.

Instructor Comments

Along with suggesting important frameworks and ideas associated with change management, this course also seeks to offer learners a tool kit of important online information sources along with the knowledge to use these sites to undertake practical research. In this assignment, you are pointed to three sources of information that will enable you to understand the competitive dynamics of an industry. Hoovers.com, in its industry overview section offers clearly written descriptions of the make-up of many competitive landscapes. Yahoo!Finance offers detailed financial information for the industry along with the identities and profiles of companies operating in an industry. Corporate Annual Reports or 10K documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission offer detailed assessments of the risks of operating in specific industries. Knowledge of these three important sources of information enables students to quickly understand what is going on in an industry from the point of view of investors and participants.

Assignment

You should base your responses to the following questions on the insight found in the 10K SEC filing of Helen of Troy Limited and the following websites.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission http://www.sec.gov.
Yahoo! Finance http://finance.yahoo.com.
High Beam Business http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/.
Plunkett Research http://www.plunkettresearch.com.

The 10K Form is the Annual Report filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of a company whose shares trade publicly on U.S. stock exchanges. 10K Forms offer a discussion of risk factors that might potentially affect a company's bottom line and hence bring about change.

Please answer the following questions:

High Beam Business and Plunkett Research offer overviews of industries on their websites. Please cite and briefly describe in your own words the competitive landscape of this industry using either of these information sources.

Using the 10K filings for the most recent year and for 2000, please examine the risk factors for your company and two of its competitors. For each company, please identify three risks that have remained the same, three risks that were present in 2000 but not in the most recent filing, and three risks that are present in the most recent year but not in 2000.

Using the 10K filings For all three companies, please identify three risks that were common in 2000 and three risks that are common in the most recent filing.