FPL An Overview FPL Group, Inc. is Florida's largest electric utility company. In 1925, through the consolidation of numerous electric and gas companies, they formed Florida Power & Light Company (FP&L). FP&L grew steadily over the next 50 years until rising fuel costs, operating issues, and construction costs began to decrease profitability. In the mid-1980s, FPL diversified with four major acquisitions - Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company, Telesat Cablevision, Inc., CBR Information Group Inc., and Turner Foods Corporation- in order to minimize the potential risk within the utilities industry. To address problems in operations, FPL began a rigorous program of Japanese-inspired quality control. Management succeeded in …show more content…
This revision included the utilities' competitive position as part of its financial rating. FPL's positions rose based on the new criteria, placing them in the top 10% of publicly owned utilities. Major Issues Confronting FPL in 1994 In spite of a favorable position rating, FPL cannot ignore the deregulation movements threatening their current business landscape. The most important issues facing FPL in May 1994 are potential competition resulting from industry deregulation and their high payout ratio. 1) Retail Wheeling The threat of retail wheeling within FPL's market forces management to consider whether or not they can maintain high payout ratios. Retail wheeling is reshaping the utilities industry and if enacted in Florida, it will bring grave challenges to the future of FPL. 2) Low Capacity Margin FPL must prepare for increased competition from the establishment of retail wheeling and other forms of distribution deregulation. FPL is an old firm which is running at roughly 92% capacity. Their low capacity margin (8.6%) suggests that they have less room for growth compared to their competitors. FPL must work to foster growth in order to survive in an evolving industry. 3) Transmission & Power Costs FPL carries a transmission cost of nearly double the industry average. FPL's cost is $.0019 compared to the $.0010 of their peers. With the
• Tremendous price and wage competition in a recurring industry will lead to additional losses in profits.
| * Having very little financial resources can leave Fresh Connections susceptible to the business uncertainties of this industry * Currently highly dependent on a stagnating market segment as Retail make up half their sales
More shelf and trade promotion: The third strategy would be to spend more money on shelf
The first of Porter’s Five Forces is the threat of new entrants. According to the case study, there has been a wave of new entrants to the retail industry. These include Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, Old Navy and the recently irrelevant, Target Canada. The second force, the threat of substitute products or services, is also prevalent in the retail market. Inevitably, the target audience that the Hudson’s Bay Company is trying to cater to, will shop at other retail stores for the same goods due to consumers behaviours and preferences. Another impacting force is the bargaining power of suppliers. However, this force does not play as large of an impact to HBC as one might initially assume. Traditionally, HBC among other large retail stores makes a large percentage of their
Lowe’s is the 14th largest retailer in the United States and is presently planning aggressive expansion, opening a new store on average every three days. Lowe's revenue growth is primarily a function of penetration of the market increase resulting from a burst of new locations instead of the same store sales. Although Lowe’s has grown tremendously, it remains half the size of Home Depot and has serious debt burden that increases its risk level drastically. Lowe’s is Home Depot’s largest competitor because both companies have the same products, services, and enormous warehouse formats. In this major retail market Lowe’s and Home Depot stores go toe
Traditional retail stores cannot strictly be classified as competitors, because of their different operating methods. While retailers rely on consumers setting foot into their stores, Calyx & Corolla reaches out to its target market by way of catalogs, telemarketing, and in some cases, promotional tie-ins with selected retail stores. Even the approach of FTD follows more closely the traditional retail model than that of Calyx & Corolla. It is precisely for this reason that Ruth Owades saw an opportunity to delve into an unexplored market. However, while Calyx & Corolla enjoy a much higher operating gross per sale,
* The various products of the financial planning industry were targeted towards baby boomers or blue collar employees so strategies and products could be developed with the target market as the young people below the age of 25.Q2. Analyze Best Financial’s strengths and weaknesses. How will these corporate capabilities affect the growth strategy?Answer:The strengths and weaknesses of Best Financial are:Strengths: * In one of the biggest cities in Southwest Ontario, Sarnia had an average population of 70000 with the average age of 43.2 years which fell in their target customer segment, hence, their current focus on the clients in that age range was one of the strengths of Best Financial. * The domain expertise of Linda Best was one of the main strengths of the company as she had about eight years of experience in the financial services industry. She got her CFP certification very early on in her career and had been assisting clients in making important financial decisions since then. Another employee, Mary Thompson had been in the financial services industry and had a thorough knowledge of Canadian and US Income tax and of mutual funds. * Best Financial had formed good personal relationships with many clients and managed over 1000 financial plans. They had a sturdy client list with some of the clients, in the same household , taking more than one financial plan. * Their
2. What do the results say about how firms in this industry can deliver strong financial returns in different ways?
The project will be owned and operated by Northern Pass Transmission LLC, which is owned by Eversource Energy Transmission Ventures, Inc., which is one of about fifty wholly
In March 2012, ConocoPhillips Company and ConocoPhillips Canada Marketing & Trading ULC expressed intent to assign the Keystone Expansion, Patoka and Marketlink Transportation Service Agreements to Phillips 66 Canada ULC. The year before, the Conoco Phillips board of directors announced that it would pursue the separation of its refining and marketing and exploration and production business into two separate standalone companies. Phillips 66 was to be the refining and marketing company and COP was to become the exploration and production company. The TransCanada credit risk department assessed that COP and CPCMT had an “A” credit rating and assets totaling $110,000,000,000 while Phillips 66 had a “BBB-” credit rating and estimated assets of
The latest NRSS survey identified 72 LP programs used by retailers and the most frequently used ones are listed in Figure 5. Some of the programs meet more than one objective listed above. There is a complex interaction of these programs with their varied effects on shrink reduction. This makes it very difficult for a retailer to isolate the value add of a single new program. It is even more difficult to figure out how much shrink will increase when a program is discontinued due to budgetary pressures. Large retailers have implemented almost all of these identified programs in their stores while small and medium sized retailers are having to pick and choose specific programs they believe gives them the biggest return on investment. All of these programs generate data points over time and LP organizations can harness the power of analytical techniques to combat
Due to the (Harvard Business School, 9-298-095, May 2001) Norfolk Southern expresses its concern about a merger between CSX and Conrail. It would have significant consequences on Norfolk Southern way of doing business. They could be excluded from important markets. As a broker says letting the CSX Contrail merger pass could mean the end of doing business for Norfolk Southern. We believe that this is the main reason, but Norfolk Southern can also see synergies inform of both cost savings and increasing revenues.
The FPL Group was Florida’s largest electric utility group and the fourth largest in America. The FPL Group had annual revenues of exceeding $5 billion. Florida Power & Light Company, the main subsidiary of the FPL Group had 3.9 million customer accounts and covered a service area that included six of America’s ten fastest growing metropolitan areas.
Finally, while it is not mentioned in the case, it may be that FPL could use the rise of retail wheeling to expand its market outside of Florida itself. With low projections of capital expenditure anticipated for the following years, and an ensuing dividend cut, FPL could choose to invest significantly in increasing capacity so as to be ready to
There are many theoretical and empirical results describing the decisions companies make in this area. At the same time, however, there is no generally accepted model describing payout policy. Moreover, empirical findings are often contradictory or difficult to interpret in light of the theory. In their seminal paper, Miller and Modigliani (1961) showed that under certain assumptions dividends are irrelevant; all that matters is the firm’s investment opportunities. Miller and Modigliani considered the case of perfect capital markets (no transaction costs or tax differentials, no pricing power for any of the participants, no information asymmetries or costs), rational behaviour (more wealth being preferred to less, indifference between cash payments and share value increases) and perfect certainty (future investments and profits are given). In real life, however, people seem to care about dividends. Lintner.s (1956) classical study on dividend policy suggests that dividends represent the primary and active decision variable in most situations. Lintner suggests a model of partial adjustment to a given payout rate.