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Research and Development

As the Vice President for Bid, in Competition Round 2 I had planned to leave R&D the same because I thought that Bid did very well in competition round 1 so I just wanted to play it safe.  However the ideal spot for round 2 was showing a little better and smaller than what I had it in competition round 1 so slight adjustments were made in R&D which worked because we as Team Baldwin had a successful round.  I was able to make some minor improvements without affecting costs too much. The goal was to keep R&D spending below 350, which is roughly what I spent in the first round and ended up having a great margin. In competition round 1 and 2 I fill that Bid did well and was instrumental in helping our company succeed as a whole.

Marketing

In competition round 1 I had set a promotion and sales budget of $1200 and my price for Bid was $39. In competition round 2 I left my promotion budget at 1200 because my customer awareness was well over 50 percent coming in at 60 percent, which I thought, was very well. On the other hand my customer accessibility was only at 48 percent so I decided to increase my sales budget from 1200 to 1400 in round 2 hoping to increase my customer accessibility. I did not change the price of Bid in competition round 2 it remained the same at $39 which didn’t seem to pose a problem seeing that we sold all inventory. One of my goals going forward is to raise my customer accessibility; I have yet to be able to reach 50 percent and would like to increase the accessibility of my product.

Production

In competition round 2 I did increase my production from 400 to 500 in competition round 2 due to the fact that we were able to sell all inventory in competition round 1 with no inventory left on hand which is my reasoning for increasing my production schedule a bit more. This worked as well and I was able to sell all inventories in competition round 2 as well with nothing remaining on hand, which was great to see. I did not change my automation rate in round 2, as I did not see the need as it worked well in round 1.

Finance

Baldwin Company did not issue stock in order to raise money for the company during Competition Round 2. We felt it was necessary to raise the profitability on our products to increase cash flow for competition round 2. We did however, issue long-term bonds, assuming that our R&D investments would provide a ROI that was higher than the borrowing costs. We also issued dividends in the amount of $2.00 per share. Historical data for the company revealed a $4,000,000 payout of dividends for Round 0, which we copied for Round 1.  In order to maintain the EPS, or Earnings Per Share, that our stockholders expect, we felt it was vital to issue dividends again in Competition Round 2.  Furthermore, we thought issuing dividends would help to attract additional investors to our stock, increasing its value.

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