Dear All, Your next assessment will be the group report.

Before you start, you need to choose a company, which ideally should have enough published information available. To ensure that you fully understand the requirement of group report, I would like to clarify in some detail the main focus of each chapter. Before you start, you need to consider the type of company you would like to research: --- Type A: a company who is looking for a new country to enter --- Type B: a company who has already been operating in your chosen country. Your choice of the type of company will not affect your tasks of chapters 1,2,3, and 4, but will slightly affect the tasks of chapters 5,6,and 7, which I will explain in more detail late. By its nature, Type A is in fact a plan; while Type B is an evaluation. If you understand tasks well and keep the focus right, your discussion and analysis should demonstrate the same learning outcomes set out for this report regardless of the type of company you choose. I am now moving on to the main focus of each chapter. Chapter 1 is an introduction of the whole report. It doesnt need to be long but you need to summarise the whole report, including the purpose of this report, methodology, and main issues to be discussed, structure and so on. Chapter 2 is an introduction of your company. A brief introduction of its history will be useful, including the significant events that may influence its current standing and performance, such as major technological breakthrough, and mergers and acquisitions events. But you should focus more on its current standing and performance. Chapter 3 is about the external and internal environment of the company. You should focus on your companys HOME country environment, also paying attention to the trends in the World that may impact on the industry your company operates in. To start the chapter, it will be useful to have some discussion about the relationship between environment and business, and the purpose of environment analysis. You should conduct your analysis in a systematic and focused manner, not only identifying those factors that may impact on your organization, but more importantly EVALUATING their impacts. You are encouraged to apply appropriate analytical tools. Chapter 4 is to identify and discuss your companys motives to go international. This chapter is closely related to chapter 3. You may wish to examine this issue from different perspectives: industry-based view (think about the competition), resource-based view (develop and leverage core competence) and institution-based views (stakeholders influences and expectation). Your conclusion of the chapter is crucial for the development of chapter 5 and 6, so you need to be very SPECIFIC about your motives to go abroad and objectives that company wants to achieve through internationalisation. Chapter 5 is to identify a country for your companys next move in its international expansion. To start, some discussion on the importance of the location decision to MNEs is useful. For type A company, your task is to choose a new country for your company and select from two potential countries you initially identified. Your country search should

be guided by your companys objective for international expansion, and a good understanding of companys strengths and weakness (you can refer these to the previous chapters). You should demonstrate an understanding of the factors which will affect the attractiveness and risks of a target country, and be able to apply appropriate analytical tools to your country analysis. Your final conclusion must be based on factual data that you find about the country and its relevant industry. For type B company, your task is to evaluate and justify your companys decision to enter into this country. Like type A company, you still need to examine target countrys attractiveness and risks, as well as your companys strengths and weaknesses. However, as it has already been operating in the target country, you will need to examine its performance in the target country to determine the influence of the target country decision on the performance, if such information is available. When writing this chapter, it is important to find factual based information to support your evaluation. For example, if you say the target country has a big market, you must find relevant information which supports your judgment of bigness of the market. Chapter 6 concerns market entry mode that your company will adopt to enter the country of your choice. In this chapter you need to show your understanding of factors that will influence the choice of market entry mode decision. When deciding market entry mode, your analysis should be guided by your companys objectives of internationalization, as objectives will strongly influence your preferences with regard to the level of risk and comment, entry speed, and needs for control. You should examine the advantage and disadvantage of your chosen entry mode and justify why your choice is appropriate. Or you may wish to compare two alternatives and justify your reason to choose one of them. For type A company, you need to select a proper entry mode for your company. For type B company, you not only need to justify your selected entry mode but also evaluate its impact on companys performance, if such information is available. Chapter 7 is your advice (for type A) or your evaluation (for type B) of companys international competitive strategy (Porters generic strategy framework could be useful for this purpose) that your company should adopt in your host country. The decision should be based on research outcomes you generated from the previous sections and choose your strategy. Chapter 8 Conclusion and Recommendation In this chapter, you are expected to summarise the challenges/difficulties that the company may face, especially in the new host country, and advise the possible ways to deal with them. Based on your analysis in the previous sections, you should be able to identify some of the challenges faced by the company in the host country, ideally ranking them in the order of significance to the attainment of companys objective. These could either be related to the particularly issue discussed in the report, or other issues which are not discussed but could be important for companys future. You then need to offer some advices on how to deal with them. 8. Appendix; References

You can add appendix after the main body of the report but before the references. You should NOT attach all your company information in the sector of Appendix, but only the necessary information. A list of references is compulsory for the report. You must cite sources appropriately following standard citation styles, preferably Harvard Style, whether in the main body of the report or in the reference list. If you cite online resources, it is insufficient to merely cite a URL, full detail must be given, including the date of publication or visit. The above structure is a guideline only, you can modify this outline, or organise your report in different ways, as long as it suits the purpose of this report. Finally, you may find it difficult to obtain concrete numbers that would allow you to calculate the cost of the investment project or forecast revenue. So you may omit the detailed calculation of investment project, but to focus on the central strategic issues. Your group report will be evaluated by your ability to Apply theory to practice Identify important issues that challenge MNEs internationalization process Conduct relevant analysis utilising the concepts, framework, theories and analytical tools learned from the module Provide coherent and feasible alternatives Recommend consistent implementation strategy Construct a well written, thoroughly referenced and professional presented report. Deadline to submit the group coursework is 4pm on 16th April, 2012.

When prepare this report, you are encouraged to apply relevant theories of this module to your tasks. Some students said there is no enough space for a thorough discussion. I should make it clear that the purpose to impose a strict word limit is to encourage you to write in a focused and concise manner and to present your report in an effective way. Apart from the content, a good report should show consistency and coherence in its structure, style and presentation. It may be useful before every member starts his/her part(s), the group decides a presentation style the group will use, for example, font, word size, line spacing, paper margin, table style, referencing style and so on. An agreed unified style will greatly reduce the workload at the end when you integrate all parts together. I hope you can manage teamwork well and complete your group report on time, I can also understand that sometime things do not always go smoothly, especially when different members in a group may have different priorities and give different levels of importance to the group work. It is necessary to remind you that although each member of a group will get same mark for the group report, tutors may use discretion to mark some of members lower if there is enough evidence to suggest that they were less cooperative in teamwork, or lacked of effort and made little contribution to the completion of the report. To organize your teamwork well and monitor each members effort, I would urge every group to keep a MEETING LOG which records the group activities and each members contribution to the preparation and completion of the report. When you submit the report, be sure each member initialises the chapter(s) that s/he is responsible for, and follow the submission instructions in the module handbook.

Finally, I would also remind you that it is always useful to back up your work, especially towards the deadline while most works have been done, just in case. If there is anything you are not sure, please do not hesitate to ask your seminar tutor and myself. Regards, Yi