Fortuneがグローバル500を発表

 

Posted at 2015.07.25     Category : Fortune

毎年恒例のFortuneグローバル500社が発表されました。こちらのリンクで500社を確認できますし、国別などでソートできるのもありがたいです。やっぱり経済での中国の存在感の大きさはランキングからしても明らかになっています。

今年トップ10の利益が減ったのは多くが石油関連企業だったためのようです。

2000年は中国の会社は10社だったが、2015年では98社が500位にランクインしているそうです。ちなにみ日本は54社がランクインで最高位は9位のトヨタでした。

500社ある内で女性のCEOが14人、そのうちアメリカが12人、インドが2人の状況はまだまだ世界的にも女性進出は道半ばですね。

 

IKEAの快進撃を支えるものは？

 

Posted at 2015.03.26     Category : Fortune

大塚家具の争いが注目を集めていますが、ちょうどIKEAの韓国進出に合わせてFortuneが特集を組んでいました。日本海の表記の問題にも触れていますが、概ね好意的に受け止められているようです。動画を見るとわかりますが、アメリカではアイキーアと呼んでいます。

How Ikea took over the world
By Beth Kowitt

In a stunning global expansion, the Swedish home furnishings giant has been quietly planting its blue and yellow flag in places you’d never expect. Pay attention, Wal-Mart: You could learn a few things.

Even with all that careful planning, Ikea managed to get a few things wrong. It misjudged the number of parking spaces needed, and a seemingly benign map for sale upset some customers: The body of water east of Korea was labeled the Sea of Japan rather than the East Sea, as South Koreans prefer.

But the Koreans seem, for the most part, to have forgiven the Swedes. Today the Gwangmyeong store, which is the company’s largest in the world by shopping area, is on track to become one of Ikea’s top-performing outlets for 2015.

インドや中国など、中産階級が拡大している国でもIKEAは好調を維持しているようです。

The success is hardly a fluke. Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea—flat packing, transporting, and reassembling its quirky Swedish styling all across the planet. The furniture and furnishings brand is in more countries than Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Toys “R” Us. China, where Ikea has eight of its 10 biggest stores, is the company’s fastest-growing market. An outlet in Morocco is coming soon, and there are hints that Brazil may not be far off. Meanwhile, Ikea is going meatballs out in India, where it plans to invest about $2 billion over a decade to open 10 stores.

Getting it right in emerging markets like China and India, where Ikea is well-positioned to capitalize on a growing middle class, is a key factor in its goal of hitting €50 billion in sales by 2020. That’s up from €28.7 billion in its fiscal 2014 ($39 billion based on the average exchange rate for Ikea’s fiscal year) and almost double its 2005 sales level. Today the Ikea Group has 318 stores, not including the brand’s some four dozen franchised locations; it’s aiming for around 500 by 2020.

ボリュームを前面に出せば海外進出が成功するとは限らないんですよね。ここでもWal-Martがことあるごとに比較されていますが、Wal-Martは中国で苦労しています。

There are important lessons here for Wal-Mart, which has sometimes struggled overseas, and for Target, featured in Fortune’s March 1 issue, which recently decided to pull out of Canada after a disastrous expansion.

The Ikea model is based on volume—producing a lot of the same stuff over and over, which helps it secure a low price from suppliers and in turn charge a low price to customers. One Billy bookcase, an Ikea classic, is sold every 10 seconds. More stores mean more volume and the chance to drop prices even more, which Ikea did by an average of 1% last year.

For the company, this isn’t just a business model, apparently. It’s a mission: helping “the many people” and those with “thin wallets,” which is a mantra spoken by company employees everywhere from Croatia to Qatar. “We’re guided by a vision to create a better everyday life for the many people. That is what steers us, motivates us—that is our role,” says Ikea Group CEO Peter Agnefjäll, a 20-year company veteran, who took the helm in 2013. “We feel almost obliged to grow.”

IKEAの強みの一つに商品開発に力を入れて、いろいろとリサーチもしていることがあるようです。ここが単に安くすればいいという方針に違いを生み出しているのでしょう。

Today research is at the heart of Ikea’s expansion. “The more far away we go from our culture, the more we need to understand, learn, and adapt,” says Mikael Ydholm, who heads research. Rather than focus on differences between cultures, it’s his job to figure out where they intersect.

The company, for example, did a study of 8,292 people in eight cities, examining morning routines. People are the fastest out the door in Shanghai (56 minutes) and the slowest in Mumbai (2 hours, 24 minutes), where they’re also the kings of the snooze (58% hit the button at least once). New Yorkers and Stockholmers are the most likely to work in their bathrooms (16%). But regardless of city, women spend more time than men picking out their outfit for the day, a process many find stressful.

ただし、各国向けに商品開発するのではなく、商品の使用方法をその国に合わせてアレンジしていくというようです。動画でもtatamiと言っていましたが、the Japanese version might incorporate tatami mats, and the Dutch room will have slanted ceilings, reflecting the local architecture.と日本とオランダでの商品ディスプレイを変えているようです。

The aim of gaining all this cultural knowledge is not to tweak the products for each market. The Ikea model, remember, is volume, volume, volume: It needs vast economies of scale to keep costs low, and that means creating one-size-fits-all solutions as often as possible. Rather, Ikea has gotten awfully good at showing how the same product can mesh with different regional habitats.

Witness the full-size sample rooms that Ikea sets up in stores and where customers will sometimes be caught napping. The rooms play an essential, if secret role, showing consumers how to fit Ikea pieces into their lives. Displays in Sendai, Japan, and Amsterdam could feature the same beds and cabinets, for example. But the Japanese version might incorporate tatami mats, and the Dutch room will have slanted ceilings, reflecting the local architecture. Beds in the U.S., meanwhile are covered with pillows.

商品の使用方法の提案としてカタログも各国向けに作っていることもあります。年間２億冊で３２ヶ国語で６２バージョンとはすごいですね。日本でもニュースになったサウジアラビア向けで女性を消したりしたことにも触れています。

Ikea’s catalogues serve a similar purpose as the sample rooms—and, again, the company has invested in the strategy in a comprehensive way. Catalogues come in 32 languages and 67 versions, with each reflecting local customers and customs. There are two catalogues for Belgians: one in French, another in Flemish. Ikea customers in Winnipeg and Calgary typically see a different version from their Francophone countrymen in Montreal.

Ikea printed 217 million copies of its most recent annual tome—which the company claims is the biggest run of any publication of its kind in the world—producing them in a studio in Älmhult, Sweden. For every room setup, there is an Ikea employee standing by responsible for tracking any element that needs to be switched out—making sure that glass products produced in mainland China don’t show up in Taiwan’s catalogue and removing Persian rugs from the one that gets mailed to Israelis.

Ikea has not always gotten these local nuances right. The company came under fire for Photoshopping women out of its catalogue in Saudi Arabia and for removing a lesbian couple from its magazine in Russia. “We have done mistakes,” acknowledges Kajsa Orvarson, communications officer at Ikea Communications, the home of the catalogue, “but we are becoming more and more aware of how to improve and to share our values.”


デザインへの取り組みの具体例などもあげられていますが、大塚家具のように高級志向か中級志向かなんておおざっぱなはなしでは太刀打ちできない感じがしてしまいます。所詮、家具メーカーから仕入れているんでしょうから、商品開発力のレベルが違いすぎます。

Ikea’s designers look well beyond the furniture industry for expertise when it comes to trimming production costs. They’ve commissioned a shopping-cart manufacturer, for instance, to mass-produce a new table and a bucket maker to punch out a chair. As the price of wooden drums declines, Engman has considered using a drum supplier for round tables. The same goes for materials such as cork, which is in greater supply as wine bottles increasingly employ screw tops and plastic stoppers.

So, too, design inspiration comes from everywhere. Engman points out a folding table that he saw in bars and restaurants throughout China. “It costs near to nothing,” he says. “It is the smartest table. It has the construction of an ironing board.” He is also excited these days about acacia wood, which Ikea sources primarily from Southeast Asia. Normally used in outdoor furniture, acacia has the properties of teak but the price of pine. Its downside is it turns as it grows and does so even more when it dries, making it hard to glue together. (That’s why particleboard became so popular in furniture; it’s also cheap, and every piece is alike.) But Engman says his team had a “breakthrough” in working with and drying the wood.

部屋や店の改装はTOEICでも登場します。Bedroom makeoverという動画がありました。



（ロングマン）
makeover
1 if you give someone a makeover, you make them look more attractive by giving them new clothes, a new hair style etc
2 if you give a place a makeover, you make it look more attractive by painting the walls, putting in new furniture etc:
It's time we gave the kitchen a makeover.

TOEICとしてはmakeoverよりもremodelingやrenovationが使われますよね。

I decided to buy a top-of-the-line Ometro refrigerator for my newly remodeled kitchen.

 

Race together

 

Posted at 2015.03.23     Category : Fortune

一週間遅れの話題ですが、スターバックスの試みです。



Starbucks to encourage baristas to discuss race relations with customers
by Phil Wahba @philwahba MARCH 16, 2015, 5:26 PM EDT
CEO Howard Schultz is encouraging his employees to bring up the hot-button issue — his latest foray into controversial topics.

Starbucks SBUX -0.34% CEO Howard Schultz has never shied away from involving his company in controversial debates, whether those debates are about same-sex marriage, or gun control, or U.S. government gridlock.
But the executive, who oversees a coffee empire with 4,700 U.S. stores, has now taken on arguably the most polarizing political debate in the United States: race relations.



先月のTimeのカバーストーリーで人種間の緊張が高まると人々は外出しなくなるので、スタバの売り上げも下がってしまうことがわかりました。だからというわけではないですが、スタバで語る話題なのかと疑問視する反応の方が多い感じです。

March 16, 2015 Company
What ‘Race Together’ Means for Starbucks Partners and Customers

It began with one voice
As racially-charged tragedies unfolded in communities across the country, the chairman and ceo of Starbucks didn’t remain a silent bystander. Howard Schultz voiced his concerns with partners (employees) in the company’s Seattle headquarters and started a discussion about race in America.
Despite raw emotion around racial unrest from Ferguson, Missouri to New York City to Oakland, “we at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America," Schultz said. "Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are."
Partners were not silent. For more than an hour, at an all-hands meeting at the Starbucks Support Center, partners representing various ages, races and ethnicities passed a microphone and shared personal stories.
“The current state of racism in our country is almost like humidity at times. You can’t see it, but you feel it,” said one partner.

 

Steve Jobs-ian, reminiscent of Steve Jobs, apparent memento mori

 

Posted at 2014.12.12     Category : Fortune

Elizabeth HolmesさんがFortuneの主催するMost Powerful Women Next Gen Summitに登壇されていました。人物紹介のところで、Fortuneの人がカバーストーリーで取り上げたのはFortuneが一番先だったと得意げに語っています。

2014 FORTUNE MPW NEXT GEN SUMMIT
DECEMBER 2-3, 2014: SAN FRANCISCO, CA
The inaugural Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit was held December 2 and 3 at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco. It gathered preeminent rising women in business—along with select leaders in government, philanthropy, education, sports and the arts—for a wide-ranging conversation. The conversations covered key business, political and societal issues—as well as career-related topics like negotiating, managing a crisis, getting on boards, raising money and more. To see full coverage of the Summit, go to Fortune.com/MPW, and to view photos of the event click here.

If you would like to nominate a qualified young executive to receive an invitation to attend Fortune MPW Next Gen in 2015, please complete and submit our nomination form.

以下のように記事としても取り上げられています。

Beyond blood: Theranos' billionaire founder talks growth
by Patricia Sellers @pattiesellers DECEMBER 8, 2014, 1:32 PM EST

Holmes founded Theranos, a blood diagnostics business, 11 years ago when she was a student at Stanford. She dropped out of college during her second year, relentlessly altered her vision and business plans, went on to raise more than $400 million in funding, and today runs a company that investors value at $9 billion. Holmes, now 30, owns more than half of this fast-growing health-care startup.

Last June, my colleague Roger Parloff did a fascinating Fortune cover profile of Holmes, who was then a little known entrepreneur. Holmes is quickly becoming famous, and in this week’s New Yorker, Ken Auletta has a fascinating story about Holmes, shedding more light on her business as well as her uniquely austere approach to life. (“She no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office,” Auletta writes.)

この動画を見て、Holmesさんの服装に目がいったと思います。このFortuneの記事では以下のように表現しています。

Elizabeth Holmes is not your typical woman entrepreneur. And even though her habitual style of dress—black turtleneck and black suit—is Steve Jobs-ian, this self-made multi-billionaire is unlike anyone Silicon Valley has seen before.

目立つ特徴ですから、New YorkerやFortuneのカバーストーリーでも取り上げています。Steve Jobsを尊敬しいていて、彼を意識してのことのようですね。

（New Yorker）
She was wearing her daily uniform—a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs—and had pinned her hair into an unruly bun.

(Fortune Cover Story)
During my four days at Theranos, Holmes dressed identically every day: black jacket; black mock turtleneck; black slacks with a wide, pale pinstripe; and black low-heel shoes. Steve Jobs, because of his vision and perfectionism about “great products”–words Holmes punches out with precisely Jobs’ brio–is obviously a hero to her. As an apparent memento mori, she hangs in her office a framed screenshot of his Apple Internet bio, printed out on Aug. 24, 2011, the day he stepped down as CEO because of pancreatic cancer.

同じトピックについてさまざまなメディアに触れると表現の違いを比較できるので、英語表現を学べます。