Читать книгу Process Industries 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Any business must have a long-term vision, to plan for the future. It must examine and review its strategy, which can simply be defined as an objective to be achieved, and determine the related means. In what follows, we will limit ourselves to the industrial strategy, which amounts to examining the adequacy between the products that the company has at a given time and the needs of the customers, which can be very variable from country to country.

A product is born, lives, and dies, as shown in Figure 1.2a. The turnover of a company, and therefore its profit, is composed, at a given moment, of products that are at different stages of their existence, as shown in Figure 1.2b. New products in the process of being launched sometimes cost money instead of bringing in money, because the related commercial costs (product managers, advertising, canvassing) are not covered by their contribution margin, as these products are manufactured in too small a volume. For the same reasons, end-of-life products are no longer competitive: they have found replacements, either in the company that created them, or in the competition; their selling prices tend to fall.

In general, a company has flagship products from which it hopes to “benefit” for a long time. Pharmaceutical companies dream of blockbusters whose turnover exceeds one billion dollars. The vitality of a company, the efficiency of its research, can be measured by the percentage of profit brought by products that are a few years old, and are therefore young products. Often, financial analysts try to assess the products that the company has in the “pipeline”.

Figure 1.2. a) Product life cycle; b) company turnover versus products