M.B.A. DEGREE EXAMINATION, MAY 2017
Final Year
D INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT
International Business
Time 3 Hours Maximum Marks: 75
SECTION-A × 5 15)
Answer three questions
Q1) Restricted trade.
Strategic planning.
Corporate culture.
International logistics.
GATT.
Regional trade disparities.
SECTION-B × 15 45)
Answer three questions
Q2) Describe the process of international business.
Q3) Write about M-M approach for international trade.
Q4) Bringout the factors influencing multinational corporate culture.
Q5) Examine the role of negotiations in international business.
Q6) Discuss about co-operation between regional trade groups.
Q7) Enumerate the role of WTO in the settlement of business issues between the
countries.
SECTION-C
Compulsory
Q8) Case study.
LAKE WOOD FOREST PRODUCTS
Ward insisted that to truly penetrate the international market, he would
need to keep his labor cost low. As a result, he decided to automate as much of
the production as possible. However, no equipment was readily available to
produce chopsticks, because no one had automated the process before.
After much searching, Ward identified a European equipment
manufacturer who produced machinery for making Popsicle sticks. He
purchased equipment from the Danish firm to better carry out the sorting and
finishing processes. However, because aspen wood was quite different from the
wood for which the machine was designed, as was the final product, substantial
design adjustments had to be made. Sophisticated equipment was also purchased
to strip the bark from the wood and peel it into long, thin sheets. Finally, a
computer vision system was acquired to detect defects in the chopsticks. The
system rejected more than 20 percent of the production, and yet some of the
chopsticks that passed inspection were splintering, Howerver, Ward firmly believed
that further fine-tuning of the equipment and training of the new work
force would gradually take care of the problem.
Given this fully automated process, Lakewood Forest Products was able to
develop capacity for up to 7 million chopsticks a day. With a unit manufacturing
cost of $0.03 and anticipated unit selling price of $0.057, Ward expected to earn
a pretax profit of $4.7 million in 1988.
Due to intense marketing efforts in Japan and the fact that Japanese
customers were struggling to obtain sufficient supplies of disposable chopsticks,
Ward was able to presell the first five years of production quite quickly. By late
1987, Lakewood Forest Products was ready to enter the international market,
with an ample supply of raw materials and an almost totally automated plant,
Lakewood was positioned as the world's largest and least labor-intensive
manufacturer of chopsticks. The first shipment of six containers with a load of
12 million pairs of chopsticks to Japan was made in October 1987.
Questions for Discussion:
What are the environmental factors that are working for and against
Lakewood Forest Products both at home in the United States and in the
target market, Japan?
New-product success is a function of trial and repurchase. How do
Lakewood's chances look along these two dimensions?