Driven Athletic Footwear Executive Summary

There are several reasons why AGI should consider Mercury Athletic as an appropriate target for acquisition. First, acquiring Mercury could improve both companies financially. Acquiring Mercury would double AGI’s revenue. Although Mercury’s financial performance has been disappointing, they experienced top line growth of 20% in 2006. Unfortunately, their profitability has been disappointing due to price concessions to big box retailers and an unsuccessful women’s line. Mercury’s (and ultimately AGI’s) profitability could be improved by the synergies of the two companies merging. Synergies within supply chain, operations, research and development, and advertising should all improve Mercury’s EBITDA.

The company started off producing 20,000 units of mountain bikes. We did not change the production quantity. Last year our forecast sales were 24,000 when we only sold 19,866; therefore we thought it would be best to leave production at 20,000 bikes. Having excess inventory, we concluded that 20,000 units should be enough considering our quality has not changed and our advertising will not increase the sales dramatically. Although we had the choice to produce as much as 30,000 units, we felt as though we did not have sufficient money to increase production. We were interested in allocating the money towards marketing as opposed to production. We realized that without awareness, no matter how many units we make, sales would be inefficient.

West Coast Fashions, Inc has decided to sell one of their segments, Mercury Athletic in the context of a broader reorganization. The head of the business development for Active Gear, Inc(AGI), John Liedtke, views this event as a good

This then translates to a 50% chance of not having inventory available during job opportunities. Therefore, opportunity costs might occur. The indifference of the production managers' in these aspects of inventory control is alarming and should be acted upon.

sale of Nike’s high-margin products to high-end customers. Regardless of the low cost of the World Shoes, they

My recommendation is for the company to stay focused on its main competitive advantage of supplying a

New Balance was founded by William J. Riley in 1906 in the city of Boston. Riley started by making arch supports for customers who had to spend all day on their feet. Over time the building of arch supports led to the creation of his first running shoe in 1925. As part of a local running club, Riley capitalized on an opportunity to improve running shoes of the time and his designs became widely popular. His new running shoes became so popular that by the 1940’s that production spread from running to many other sports. Then the expansion of the manufacturing significantly increased as he realized a need to running shoes with more selection for wider feet, and

We adjusted focus to our niche market, sold off capacity in the low end and traditional markets, and proceeded to decrease our production going into the next round. While selling capacity was the correct financial decision to combat our emergency loan, we were then left with stock outs in all of our product lines. As a result, we continued to struggle with overproduction and avoiding stock outs, but made improvements resulting in less drastic inventory swings in the later

As our strategy of ‘high price-low volume’ suggests, we wanted to sell our bikes at a higher price than was recommended by the market. In the first rollover however, we decided to increase the price of our bike from the recommended $550 to $579. We were being careful about the chances that other firms would not increase their price of the bike as much as we would, and thus capture more of the market by doing so. We felt that we needed to produce a bit more than the current capacity suggested, from 20,000 to 22,000 bikes. The cost of goods sold would decrease if we produced many bikes this rollover, so the decision to produce more bikes on average only for this rollover was upheld.

This manager’s report provides a financial performance review of the business operations for athletic footwear industry’s Elite Feet for production Years 11 through 18. Included in the report are trends in company’s annual total revenues, earnings per share (EPS), return on equity (ROE), credit rating, stock price and image rating. Additionally reported are the strategic vision for the company, performance targets for the aforementioned production years plus the next two years, the company’s competitive strategy as well as production strategy, finance strategy and dividend policy. Also discussed is a look at the company’s closest competitors and the actions that could be

The industry witnessed several industry level stock outs, because of low production capacities. Ideally most should have been made of the situation. We should have seen the opportunities and worked to achieve way beyond our set goals.

The actions I took in attempts to reduce or better yet, eliminate the issue of overabundant product inventory, included making my shipments larger so that stores where there was low inventory product could retain a normal or slightly more of the product to reduce risk of shortage. Due to making my shipments larger I added an additional truck to assist in getting the product inventory from the warehouse to the stores.

Produce more products so there is less restocking issues but not more than the market calls for (supply and demand),

Support: The inventory increase in 1997, YOY, was 58%. Additionally, the COGS to revenue ratio reduced from to 72% in 1997. This combination of increase in inventory and reduction in COGS as a percentage of revenue seems to indicate that the fixed costs may have been spread over a larger base through over production, thereby causing the COGS to reduce. This may be a cause for concern and could be a potential red flag.

The athletic shoe industry is made up of companies that produce footwear for athletic use. This is a strong industry and has been around for over 100 years. The athletic shoe industry is one of the fastest growing footwear industries and have top growing sales compared to other footwear industries (NDP Group, 2016). The key players that currently dominate the market are Nike, Adidas, and Puma (Kates & Bolduc, 2013). This paper will use the porter five forces, industry life cycle, and the key players to understand the industry. Over these years the athletic shoe industry has grown into a competitive market.