Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Period 8 Decision and Results

Rationale:

With two competitors with one brand and another brand on its way in Nutrites, we need to be careful to not give up too much ground. Riesling will likely take a bit of market share away from TUGR, but so long as we snag a fair share of the growth in the segment, we should be fine.

To figure out which metrics to go after on semantic/MDS scales, we are using a new method rather than just going after the obvious low-hanging fruit. We are taking the difference between our brand's perceived position and its segment's ideal values then multiplying the result by the utility weight for each characteristic. This value will tell us which characteristic we have the most to gain from improving upon its perceptions for each brand. There have been some surprising results from this analysis. For instance, we never would have thought to advertise the packaging characteristic for TILT by just looking at the semantic scale map, but this analysis has that characteristic's difference in part-worth being 33% higher than any of the others when importance is taken into account. Though TUGR has several segments that could use work, we decided to put everything into the clinical characteristic because that is the only characteristic that we lag on against Riesling's RUGS.

Our spending on advertising this period is going to need to cannibalize several of our Clinites brands. At first, we were going to try and keep things relatively close as far as how much we spend compared to our competitors. This is unwise. Of our top three products last period, only one was Clinites (TINY), and TUNA in third place had more than double the contribution than the brand with the fourth highest contribution, TILT. A $43 million (TUNA) to $18 million (TILT) split should not result in the two brands getting nearly the same budgets, especially when TUNA is in a growing (and much more profitable) market, and TILT is in a much more mature market. TINK will be the hardest hit due to its laggard performance compared to the other brands. Though it is our oldest self-released brand, TINK only brings in 6.4% of the contribution after marketing for the Clinites market, and 2.1% of our overall contribution last period, yet TINK commanded 10.3% of our advertising and commercial expenses. For next period, TINK will be brought closer to reality, with approximately 4% of our marketing budget going towards the brand. TINK's price will also be going up since it is still perceived lower than the ideal price point for the ME segment.

Something worrisome about this period is the fact that we will be researching a modification for TUGR. Though we do not believe we are making the same mistake as last time, the worrisome part comes in the form of the potential for excess inventory. With a transfer cost of $5.29, we will be looking at $1.058/unit disposal cost, in addition to $0.42/unit in inventory holding that we would have to accrue. If we were to miss our low end projection of 15.03 million units, this would result in $1.48 million in inventory holding and disposal costs. This does pale in comparison to the CBM/unit we would be losing of $24.03/unit, which if we missed by a million on the top end would be a devastating loss of $24 million.

Results:

Not bad, but still could have been much better. SPI is now at 12440, revenues inched up to $731 million, and EBT was $501 million, and our total contribution before marketing broke the $2 billion mark. Next period we will see our cumulative revenues break $3 billion, and our contribution after marketing and earnings before taxes break $2 billion. Big numbers, but we have some big problems as well. We saw decreases in the sizes






Thursday, April 9, 2015

Period 7 Decision and Results

Rationale:

Even after the pounding last period, this is no time to pull back on being aggressive. We just need to focus that aggression in high-growth high-profit areas rather than spreading ourselves too thin. One of our group's goals is to have the top product in all 8 segments at once. This period is likely the only period we could feasibly pull this off. We are currently in the top spot for 7 of the 8 and in a respectable 3rd place in the LI segment. TILI was introduced last period and already has 15% market share. Mimosa and Riesling gained market share for the period as well, but hopefully we can reverse that trend next period. There is quite a bit of ground to make up to beat out MINT, but with continued advertising ($1.7 m) and a slight price drop to $8.50, we should be in pretty good shape. Production is a bit hard to nail down since we could very well double our market share in this next period. Looking at the profitability of this segment, we may end up shelving this and/or another of the low profitability Clinites products to ensure a proper launch next period of TUFA.

Hopefully the revamp of TIME will end the stagnation of the HE segment. We won't be putting too much in advertising ($1.6 m), so it may be a period or two before consumers catch on to the product change. TILT and TINK will see their advertising expenditures cut as well to $1.6 and $1.5 million, respectively. All of these savings are being put into Nutrites since we will be up against competition this period. TILT will also see a price increase of $.50 due to the perception by the AF segment that TILT is priced less than ideal. With this price increase, we will be able to forego 72k in unit sales and maintain the same revenue. 

After TINY's fall from grace last period, we decided to throw everything at it to get ourselves back to a position of dominance. Commercial team, merchandising, and ad spend will all be increased while the price is dropped by $.50. We will need to sell an additional 506k units to cover the price drop, and another 175k units to cover the additional advertising and commercial costs. This should be more than feasible given our previous dominance in this segment. Production for TIME is going to be 8 million units, which gives us a range of 15.6 to 18.8 million units when our massive 9.2 million unit is taken into account. If we have no market share growth and only capture additional sales from market growth, our demand would be approximately 14 million units. We should be able to capture some market share, so risking the 1.6 million unit overrun should be worthwhile, especially if we see the segment size spike. 

We will finally be seeing some competition in Nutrites. Hopefully the teams have not learned much in the way of product launches. One worrisome factor is the size of Riesling's $20 million budget next period. They only have three products in Clinites and will have more than enough capital to make quite the splash in Nutrites. We also may have shown our hand too early by cutting the price of TUGR prior to any other entrants to the market. TUGR is still perceived as too expensive, so we will be dropping the price by $2 to $48/unit. This will require a volume increase of 337k units to cover the lost revenue. 

TUNA's inventory of 1.6 million units could just about cover its demand forecast of 1.5 million units. We will, however, be dropping TUNA's price from $100 to $80/unit. This could potentially lead to a large increase in volume, so we are putting production at 1 million units. At this level, we will need an increase of 297k units to cover the lost revenues. 

We will also be running our last R&D project, TUFA. This will be tailored for the FA segment. Hopefully FA is also the segment that the two teams entering the market plan on exploiting since our team has not had a product for that segment yet. This may be wishful thinking on our part. 

Results:

Not too bad. We broke the 10k SPI and $1 billion retail sales barriers, so that's nice. We also reversed course on the SI segment, jumping up to 62% market share from ~50%. The Clinites market as a whole grew much more than it did last period where it very nearly had negative growth. The growth rate in Nutrites dropped down to the 45% range. Given that several competitors were joining that market, we were expecting steeper growth due to a larger ad spend, but maybe the mixed messages confused consumers. The SI and LI segments are also continuing a trend of near-parity that began last period. the ME segment is still shrinking, but there was a decent sized bump in HE after several periods of stagnant or negative growth. This may be due to us altering the characteristics of TIME, which did extremely well in the segment. Our overall unit market share is 52% and our value market share is 66%. Obviously our dominance of Nutrites gives us a huge boost on the overall VMS, but even within the Clinites market we have a 50% VMS. We also have four of the top six selling brands by retail sales. Unfortunately, we were unable to snag the number one spot for the LI segment, so we are top in only seven of the eight segments.

Our modification of TIME was wildly successful. Though we have had the number one spot in the HE segment for the entire simulation, we never really had a commanding lead. With the alteration, our sales and market share more than doubled. So much so that we, unfortunately, ended up with a stock out. TIME has generally been a laggard for us, but in this one period it went from a mid-performer to one of our top non-core brands. Prior to this period TIME was definitely one of the brands that was up on the chopping block for if we decide to shelve one to cover next period's expenses.

Time to address the elephant(s) in the room: the other teams have entered the Nutrites market, and one team with some measure of success. Team Riesling debuted RUGS and team Mimosa debuted MUST. MUST looks as though it was meant for the EL segment, but they may have muffed up when calculating the clinical attribute, which will obviously work in our favor. RUGS, on the other hand, nailed that calculation and now sits perfectly aligned with EL. This is a problem. We will need to R&D new attributes for TUGR, otherwise Riesling will start chipping away at our lead. They already snagged 10% of the market, and will likely be doubling that next period (along with the doubling of the segment itself). Riesling also made a $3 million investment into Nutrites R&D, which means they will likely be coming in for the FA segment along with TUFA next period. This is a problem as well. Riesling is now at parity with us for next period's budget, which means they will be able to do a lot more since they will only have five brands to our eight, in addition to the fact that we are now going to have to drop a couple million on R&D to fix TUGR. Riesling has a great opportunity here, we just need to hope that they are unable to capitalize in a way that causes us actual harm, and not just lost potential new customers from market segment growth. Raiding our lower margin brands in Clinites for ad spend may be the best option for us. Our advertisement experiments show that last period a 20% bump in spending would have translated into $6.3 million in additional contribution at a cost of $700k, which is not a bad ROI. That would have given us another 262k units that our competitors would not have been able to pick up. Which they did.

Our production figures are still not under control. Granted, there has been a variability in the market that we have yet to have to deal with, but we may also just be getting sloppy with our forecasts and being overly optimistic. The stock out of TIME is understandable, especially considering we have been carrying inventory of TIME since pretty much the first period. TUNA's price may be pushing itself out of the market as well.






HE 

SI 
















Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Period 6 Decision and Results

Rationale:

Given that most of our strategies have been working very well, not much will need to be changed in the Clinites market. We will be launching our LI segment product, TILI, this period. Hoping for a big splash, production is at 6 million units and the ad spend is $2 million. The LI segment is forecast to grow to 19 million units from 16 million. Looking at what happens in our previous trend of launching tailored projects, nabbing at least a quarter of the market does not seem out of the question. Granted, the previous projects had a little bit of brand awareness going in, but to counter that we are pricing TILI at $9, which is $1 below what the segment leader, MINT's price is, and $1 above the segment's ideal price of $8. Though we may end up with a bit of inventory at the end of the period, running out would put us in an even worse spot. And, as was shown last period with the TUGR debacle, even massive over production costs are a drop in the bucket compared to lost sales.

TINY is about to get a face lift with a new underlying product that is specifically tailored to the SI segment. Sales of 20.3 million units last period ran past planned production of 18 million, but luckily we did not stock out. Since the underlying product was modified, we will likely see a fairly sizable bump in sales, but we are beginning to reach the limit on how much we can grow our share of the SI segment. TINK did surprisingly well, so we think that 5 million units of production is more than warranted. With inventory building up in TIME, a production reduction down to 2.7 million units should help us clear out the glut. TILT also had a small amount of inventory, but we should see that cleared out this period as well with only 2.5 million in production.

With TUNA's underlying product coming in, a 3.5 million run on top of a drastic price reduction should push volume. With price perceptions at extreme highs, both TUNA and TUGR will be reduced in price 25%. For TUGR, this brings us much closer to the ideal price for the EL segment. It is still off by quite a bit for TUNA, but this is the time for TUNA to skim as much margin as possible.

Ad dollars are at pretty much the same level across all of the brands. Though the experiments tell us to increase ad spend in certain areas, right now it is just not affordable with such a constrained budget and so many brands in our portfolio. If this becomes too much of an issue, we should explore shelving a low-profitability brand. Or slash its budget to shift resources into brands that could either use help or could have a big boost.

Next period, the need for our sizable commercial teams will have to be explored as a potential cost-saving measure, especially if we do not see a sizable gain in our budget. Without a gain, it will be difficult to R&D a third Nutrites product with so many other products in our portfolio.

At first we were worried that a team may be entering Nutrites this period, but their investment of $2.7 million is not nearly enough capital to complete a Nutrites project. The cheapest Nutrites project that we were able to estimate was $4.28 million, and that was with every attribute at a 10 out of 100. That means we have at least one more period of Nutrites dominance. Team R (the ones that invested), had their budget jump by a large margin this period, so they will have more than enough to enter the market. Hopefully they will use the same methodology for their RIBS R&D, since it ended up not aligning with the LI segment's ideal product.

For a last minute change, the decrease in price for TUGR and TUNA will not be as drastic. With the market still closed to outsiders for at least one more period, perhaps skimming more margin would be a better tactic. At the $45/unit price point, the first 2.6 million units beyond our sales from last period would be going towards covering the lost margin of approximately $9.22/unit (not $15 because our average selling price is ~61% of the retail price). We will instead have to depend on the first 1.5 million units after passing our previous period, a much more manageable figure, which could also be easily covered by the increase in volume simply due to the price break. With this price move, we should hopefully be able to see what the elasticity is, but due to the shift in TUNA and the change in its underlying product, the results may be a bit muddy.

Results:

Ouch. This decision shows the truth of the axiom "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and boy did we break it. Over 7 million in unit sales lost for TINY compared to last period. Over 9 million in inventory just for TINY. One major issue can be seen in the semantic perceptual maps. TINY is lined up with every single metric except for price, even though price did not change at all. TINY is currently perceived as being too expensive. So the question now becomes: should we change the price or pump ad dollars into shifting the perception of our price? Possibly a combination of the two will bring the market back together like it was in previous periods. We lost over a third of our sales for TINY, dropping from 20.3 million units down to 13.2 million. This fluctuation cost us $37.8 million in contribution margin. It also cost us $2.2 million in holding costs. All-in-all this hurt. A lot.

The Clinites market as a whole increased in terms of unit size by just under a million units. This is tiny when compared to the 14 million unit increase in the previous period. The value of the market decreased by $37 million, so this means that new consumers in the market (and current ones) are shifting to cheaper products. Part of this could be a result of the fight that is currently taking place in the LI segment between us, Riesling, and Mimosa. Our retail sales for the period actually dropped in Clinites for the first time thus far in the simulation. Hopefully this is the only time that happens. If and when the market begins to saturate, we may need to look towards slow-paced growth instead of our hyper-aggressive strategy.

We may have reached saturation in the Clinites market. There are only 80 million people in our market. That would be upsetting. There were ~68 million units sold last period. The market forecast calls for continued growth (and unfortunately most of that comes from the LI segment), but as last period showed, that forecast can be very, very wrong. Something that is also worrisome is that the competition in the LI segment may be what is driving the growth there, and the lack of competition in SI is why there has been a contraction.

Our SPI only rose 323 points this period. This is less than half our worst period's SPI growth, and that was due to spending most of our budget on R&D for Nutrites. Hopefully this just ends up being a breather before we start climbing at a faster rate again. Some threats coming down the pipe are going to come from teams Mimosa and Riesling entering the Nutrites market next period. Both teams have had shoddy product launches in the past, so hopefully they muff their Nutrites entrances as well. Their R&D expenditures are well over $8 million, so it is likely that they are planning on going after either the HC or FA segments, which we are more than okay with.

Nutrites definitely carried us this period. We over produced for both TUGR and TUNA, but their margin is just so outrageous it is not too much of a worry, though we will need to start running more lean in Nutrites as competition enters the market. TUNA's production for next period will have to be relatively miniscule, because we currently have more units in inventory (1.6 million) than we had sales for all of last period (1.2 million), and an anemic growth forecast for the HC segment (13.3%). TUGR was left with 974k units in inventory, but growth is expected to more than double to 10.9 million units from 4.2 million units last period for the EL segment. Nutrites overall brought in $320 million in revenues and $252.8 million in CM. This blows Clinites out of the water, which only had $212.6 million in revenues and $99.5 million in CM. One reassuring thing from this period is that our (relatively) small revenue growth of $64 million from last period is more than the total revenues for three of the other four teams.



































Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Period 5 Decision and Results

Rationale:

Things are about to get really painful for the other teams. Not a single one of them spent a dime in R&D last period, so we are guaranteed at least one more period of a monopoly in Nutrites. We are going ahead with a launch of a new Nutrites product to begin building awareness for the HC brand, TUNA. Granted, we do not have any competition for the time being, but I feel like this will be a worthwhile hedge, just in case one of the other teams gets wise and is able to launch a Nutrites product at the higher-end. We also began an R&D project to create an HC-tailored product that will only cost us $3 million. Much cheaper than the previous Nutrites project. At the same time, we are going to research a modification for our Clinites flagship, TINY. Right now there are several metrics that make it a less-than-ideal product for the SI market, so our plan is go make it absolutely ideal. If we were to research the exact same specs that it currently has, we could reduce the base cost by a dollar, but we believe that the gain in market share from having a specifically tailored product will outweigh the $1/unit gain that we could get from a base reduction.

Our TINK and TILT R&D projects completed, so now we will have tailored products for ME and AF, respectively. Both have ad budgets of $2m and production runs of 2 million. These production figures may be a little low, but considering how minuscule the brand awareness is for each, we do not think that we will have stock outs. If we do, it will be a good (though painful) lesson for future launches when our product matches a segment's ideal values exactly. We are also hoping that the mismatch in brand awareness for each product will yield valuable data in order to better understand how the launch and product property relationships work.

We are considering launching a fifth Clinites brand to begin disrupting the moves that teams Mimosa and Riesling made for the LI segment. Currently, our transfer cost for TINY is a paltry $2.68, and will only go lower. The only worrisome aspect there is the idea that we could end up somewhat shooting ourselves in the foot. Since our first batch of the modified TINY is going to come in at $5/unit for the first 2.5 million units, we could end up losing an incredibly large amount of margin. At the same time, there is no one who will be able to even touch us in that segment any longer. Running an R&D for a LI project would run approximately $1.1 million, and would come in with a base cost of approximately $3.00 for the first 2.5 million. This is not only more than what TINY currently is, but TINY has been getting ~$.30 cheaper per unit every period. Perhaps the move here is to wait off on the LI introduction, relaunch TINY with the modified base, then create an LI brand with TINY as the underlying and hope that the customers in the SI segment don't notice that their previous favorite brand is now being offered for half of the price. During that introduction, we could R&D an LI product as a hedge in case the LI brand cannibalizes the SI brand too much. No matter how you cut this one, it is extremely risky. We want to beat our competition on every front, but not at the expense of a Pyrrhic victory in LI at the expense of our dominant position in SI. Such a move could also hasten the impending price war. Decisions, decisions....

Results:

Completely botched the production figures for TUGR. Over 4.2 million units in inventory resulting in $2 million in holding costs for TUGR alone. TIME was also over-produced again, but this is likely due to the modification of TILT into a product that the AF segment desires. With 467k units of over production, we had holding costs of $205k. Though the $2 million from TUGR was a lot, it only cost us 0.43% of our revenue and a mere 0.63% of our EBT. Growth was not nearly as large as expected in the Nutrites market. This may be due to our extremely high price points. We may very well be preventing people from trying our products and thus constraining the growth of the Nutrites market. The conjoint analysis for the EL and HC segments are $41 and $52, respectively, a far cry from our current asking of $60 and $120. A price drop will hopefully expand these markets to create higher volumes, which we need to capture as much as possible now, so that when another team finally enters the market, we will be in an even more dominant position.

Despite the negatives, we still performed extremely well. Our SPI is at 9137, which means that our SPI is increasing at an increasing rate. This trend will not continue ad infinitum, but we should be able to see this increasing increasing rate for at least one or two more periods. If not for the momentum lost in period 3 to research TUGR, that would have been the trend for the entire game thus far. We saw an 8.32% increase in overall market share. Most of that gain coming from TINK and TILT being modified for the ME and AF segments. Those modifications saw massive increases in market share for each of their segments, catapulting TILT from a 4% to 24% share, TINK from a 5% to a 27% (and unfortunately stocking out), and put both in first place for their respective segments. TIME saw a decrease in unit sales from the previous period, the first such decrease for us through this whole game. As said before, this is likely due to TILT grabbing so much market share. We now have the #1 brand in every segment except for LI, but the R&D project for LI finished this period, so we will hopefully be #1 in that segment after we launch next round.

Our total revenue for the period was $468 million, just shy of the $500 million barrier we were hoping to break through in this period. Our EBT was $317 million, quite a bit higher than the $190 million last period. In fact, our revenue grew at a rate of 57.4% while EBT increased 67.1%. One of the drivers for this increase was likely the $25.6 million in additional EBT from selling 449k units of TUNA at $120 a piece.

Overall sales in the Nutrites market only went up by 2128k units, which was definitely not what was expected. This came out to a (relatively) anemic growth of 60.6%. The expected growth for this period was 77.4%, which gives further evidence that we may be constraining the market with our pricing.

















Friday, March 6, 2015

Period 4 Decision and Results

Now it's time to get extremely aggressive. The other teams will have no idea what hit them over the next couple periods. The first shock is going to come with the launch of TUGR into the Nutrites market. TUGR's base cost of $8 makes charging $60 per unit ideal for some good old-fashioned price skimming. We will set the price and the standard for this market, and this is how we want to price the lower-cost option, leaving lots of room up top for the higher end products. The estimated market size is ~3.9m units, and with the only product in town, we should capture the vast majority of it. Production is set at 3m units, but it is a bit worrisome that the HC and FA segments may just choose to not purchase our product. We have not been able to glean any insight on this. Either way, next period we will be running R&D to create a brand that is tailored specifically to the HC segment.

There was something interesting in our competitors' financials from last period: R&D spending in Clinites. The amounts spent mean that two of our competitors should be launching a new Clinites product in the coming period. It will be interesting to see which markets they are attempting to tap into. AF and MI are the furthest from anyone's current offerings, so they make for fairly ripe targets. MI is much larger than AF, so this is likely where both are going to pop up. One worrying prospect is an attempt to snag some share from SI, but our current perceptual position is incredibly close to the ideal for SI, so it would be quite the ballsy move for them to pursue that as their first R&D project. In response to this, we decided to launch another brand based on a previous project, this time TILT which is based off of TIME. TILT is directed towards the AF segment. We also began R&D projects that exactly match the desired characteristics for AF and MI. Next period these projects will replace TILT and TINK. As such, the ad spend for those two brands is going to be dramatically increased to increase awareness. Both brands are being given a $1.5m ad spend, and commercial teams and merchandising are being put into proportion with their segment's size relative to TIME and TINY's. This will give our actual AF and MI brands a huge head start when they're ready. Productions were set at 400k units for both brands. We are hoping that both will stockout. Since we will be shifting to different underlying projects, any inventory left at the end of the period will have to be eaten. The current production values have TINK making us $1m and TILT breaking approximately even. Any losses incurred here will be more than worth it in the next period when our brand offerings will 1) perfectly match their segment and 2) already have a sizable brand awareness.

Going back to the model, TINY's production will be set at 14m units, and TIME's production will be set at 3.4m units; both brands will have the same price as the previous period.

Results:

Wow.

So much to talk about here. Well first and foremost, we muffed our launch of TUGR into Nutrites. Production should have matched or exceeded what the predicted market size was, and the price should have been higher. The HC segment dropped significantly in their desired price, likely due to us anchoring at $60. To combat this, we are going to launch another Nutrites brand with ads aimed at the HC segment and a price in the $90-$100 range. However, that is not to say that the $131m in revenue and $99m in EBT didn't just shoot us into the stratosphere. TUGR's revenue represented 44.4% of our total revenue, and then 52.2% of our total EBT, which is thoroughly impressive. It looks like Nutrites is going to double in the next period, so these figures are about to get out of hand really fast.

The value for Clinites market as a whole looks like its growth in growth rate has begun to ebb. That's not to say the market is shrinking by any means, with the overall growth rate still a hefty 18%. The unit growth rate is still increasing, but only slightly. This continues the downward pressure on pricing in the Clinites market.

The SI segment is still rapidly growing, and accounts for the vast majority of the growth in the Clinites market. TINY again dominated this market, gaining even more share to climb to 65%. Most of this increase is likely due to the pivot that team Mimosa made with their MINT brand. Due to their pivot, they went from a 12% share to a 5% share of what is still a rapidly growing market. Extremely unwise move. For the pivot, they researched a product that would be directed towards the LI segment. Though by itself not all too terrible of a decision, but then they decided to modify their existing MINT brand with this lower quality product. That part was a terrible decision. This ill-advised move allowed team Riesling to pick up a couple of those percentage points, moving them from 15 to 17%, gave TINY a bump from 59 to 65%, and (surprisingly) gave TINK a 1% bump as well. Team Riesling also happened to R&D a product tailored for the LI segment. They, however, took the much wiser path and launched a whole new brand, RIBS. Though RIBS has the immediate disadvantage of lack of awareness and sales volume, it makes up for it by being extremely close to LI on most every perceptual map, even making it closer than the generic brands. MINT now has the unfortunate task of traveling across the perceptual maps to get to LI from SI. This will take at least one to two more periods, during which time RIBS is going to rapidly grow. MINT's share of LI went from 10 to 17%, but RIBS went from absolutely nothing to 7%. Most of these gains were pulled from the generic brands, but a couple points also came off of TINY's share, though we are not very worried about that. Perhaps next period we will begin the process of creating a brand for LI.

It was extremely surprising to see both teams go after such an unprofitable segment. Yes, the volume there is increasing at the second highest rate. Yes, our team is in a dominant position in almost every other segment. Yes, something needed to be done if anyone wanted to turn this around. But this was not the way to do it. Had they gone for projects for MI or for AF, they would have done extremely well. The research for those products would cost a slight bit more, but both teams had the extra few hundred thousand available. Those two markets are more profitable, less price sensitive, and are not susceptible to a price war.



Market Share

Value Market Share

Net Contribution

Revenue

Share Price Index









Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Period 3 Decision and Results

With our budget now more than doubled, the time is ripe to get into the Nutrites market. The question now becomes: which segment do we target to start with? Unlike the Clinites market with its five segments, Nutrites only has three: the elderly (EL), families (FA), and health conscious (HC). EL is the smallest segment, estimated at ~300k units, but also has an average growth rate over the next five periods of 161%. FA starts at 1.2m units with average growth of 55%, and HC starts at 2.4m units with an average growth rate of 15%. Based on the semantic scales for the market, we were able to extrapolate the product features desired by each segment. After running these figures through R&D's online tool, we were able to estimate that a product tailored for EL would cost $7.8m, FA would be $8.2m, and HC would be $8.9m. Despite the $8.6m bump in budget, we still needed to make a smart strategic choice, and not just chase after the larger HC segment. If we were to pursue the HC market, we would greatly weaken our ability to skim HC. When we enter Nutrites, we plan on having our price set at 5-6 times base cost, but there are fairly sizable differences in the price sensitivities of the three segments. If we were to drop in a HC-tailored product that is perceived as being inexpensive by the HC consumers, we will be missing out on a ton of revenue. If, however, we come in on the lower end and see how everyone's perception of our price lines up, we will be able to come in at the high end with a product that is perfectly priced for the HC segment. And, from the looks of our competition, we will not need to worry about another entrant for at least two more periods, if not more. This will give our EL-tailored product a huge advantage in creating brand loyalty through the beginning stages of what will eventually become an absolutely massive market. If we can keep our competitors at bay, we could very well carry the vast majority of the 18.3m units of volume predicted in five periods for EL.

In order to bump sales for TINK, its commercial team was increased so that we could increase distribution, and price was also decreased $0.50 to increase demand. Production was also set to 0 so that we could get rid of the excess inventory.

After being burned by under-production in the previous period, TINY's production was dramatically increased. Our model suggested a production run of 9.8m units, but we threw caution to the wind and bumped that figure to 12m units. This was also due to another factor; the SI segment's ideal economic value had slightly shifted in the cheaper direction, so we opted to drop TINY's price from $14 to $13.50. This price drop was also seen as necessary because we pulled $500k from TINY's advertising budget to ensure an on-time completion of the Nutrites R&D of TUGR.

For TIME, we followed our model and set production to 2.7m units with no price change. TIME got a slight increase to its ad spend, but that was just from $38k that was lying around as extra.

Results:

Still killing.

SPI up to 2877. Our closest competitor is at 1434, which is just 11 points higher than our SPI after the first decision. $119m in revenue with $57m EBT, compared to $61m and $27m for our closest competitor. Without TUGR's R&D costs, our EBT would have been closer to $66m. Our budget next period: $21.6m. Our closest competitor's: $10.7m. Without a serious series of blunders on our part, we should have this just about locked up. Production of TIME and TINY did fairly well, neither under- nor over-produced. TINK's sales were up ~80%, but we still have 232k units in inventory. TINY had 10.5m in sales, and TIME had 2.25m in sales. Both under the production that we entered, but well within the 20% flex range. CM/unit also increased for both TINY and TIME, going from $1.80 to $3.06 and $2.82 to $4.31 for each, respectively. TINY's jump doesn't entirely make sense. The $500k that was taken out of its ad budget would have added just a few cents when divided across all 10.5m units sold. The increase in sales also does not fully account for the increase. The extra could potentially be due to economies of scale.

TINY now has 59% market share in SI and 27% overall. It also holds in the #1 spot in MI. TIME continues to hold the top spot for HE, but it is somewhat tentative with only a 2.4 point lead over the nearest competitor. Team M is making moves in the AF segment, with a 25% share, and TIME comes in second at 19.3%. That will have to change.



Market Share

Contribution Margin

Revenue

SPI