Branch Of Company Research Articles

Close Corporations — Reforming Private Company Law: European and International Perspectives

A reform of the GmbH is underway. The appearance of branches of British private limited companies in Germany in the aftermath of the Inspire Art judgment had a certain impact on the reform discussion. Which strategy should be chosen? The so-called MoMiG reform has decided: let’s face the competition. The reform aims to make the incorporation of a GmbH much quicker, easier and cheaper. It seeks to deregulate some of the complications in German law, such as contributions in kind, capital maintenance and cash pooling and rules on shareholder loans, that are difficult to understand. It will also reduce minimum capital requirements. Furthermore, the intended strategy is to modernise the company law we have and not to introduce even more and new forms of companies into our law. The MoMiG Act should reach the German Parliament in the spring of 2007 and will hopefully enter into force at the beginning of 2008.

On Language Management in Multinational Companies in the Czech Republic

In this paper, we demonstrate the dialectical relationship between micro and macro language planning: macro planning influences micro planning and yet macro planning results (or should result) from micro planning. The relation between the two planning perspectives is illustrated within the framework of Language Management Theory (Jernudd & Neustupný, 1987; Neustupný & Nekvapil, 2003). We deal with the relations between various levels of ‘organised management’, and with the role of the ‘simple, i.e. discourse-based management’ in organised language management. Attention is also given to the impact of organised language management on naturally occurring discourses and discourse-based management. The paper is empirically based on research carried out during the past two years in branches of multinational companies or corporations founded in the Czech Republic by German, Austrian or Swiss owners. We focus primarily on the situation in a subsidiary of a Siemens corporation. The languages which have become the subject of management activities here are German, English, and Czech. The data we work with were obtained using various types of interviews (semi-structured, follow-up) as well as audio-recordings and participant observation.

Adventures of a Biochemist in Virology

I was born on November 16, 1926 in Vienna, Austria, where I had my first 5 years of schooling. When I was 11 years old my family moved to Sydney, Australia, where my father had a business appointment as manager of the Australian branch of an Austrian company that marketed fine steels. I went to school in Sydney and then, from 1944 to 1947, to Sydney University where I majored in biochemistry (First Class Honors B.Sc.) and then did an M.Sc. in biochemistry in 1948. Both my thesis work and my M.Sc.

The rise of ?foreign gated communities? in Beijing: between economic globalization and local institutions

Foreign gated communities in Beijing are produced by the intertwined forces of economic globalization and local institutional changes. Since China’s economy was opened up to the world, Beijing, as the capital, has seen tremendous growth of foreign direct investment and the establishment of the branches of multinational companies. As a result, there has been increasing demand for expatriate housing. However, such demand could not be accommodated by the housing provision system and the production of foreign housing has been materialized through the newly established sector of commodity housing. Foreign housing is built into gated communities, which is attributed to more than security requirements and status differentiation; the formation of foreign gated communities should be traced back to the unusual way in which housing is produced and consumed. Spatially, foreign housing projects are clustered in the northeastern area of Beijing, along the highway leading to the airport. Such an uneven distribution has exacerbated the differential global orientation of the urban areas and laid down the basis for further social spatial differentiation.

The rise of “foreign gated communities” in Beijing: between economic globalization and local institutions

Foreign gated communities in Beijing are produced by the intertwined forces of economic globalization and local institutional changes. Since China’s economy was opened up to the world, Beijing, as the capital, has seen tremendous growth of foreign direct investment and the establishment of the branches of multinational companies. As a result, there has been increasing demand for expatriate housing. However, such demand could not be accommodated by the housing provision system and the production of foreign housing has been materialized through the newly established sector of commodity housing. Foreign housing is built into gated communities, which is attributed to more than security requirements and status differentiation; the formation of foreign gated communities should be traced back to the unusual way in which housing is produced and consumed. Spatially, foreign housing projects are clustered in the northeastern area of Beijing, along the highway leading to the airport. Such an uneven distribution has exacerbated the differential global orientation of the urban areas and laid down the basis for further social spatial differentiation.

Establishment of a Japanese-owned Automobile Company in India and Construction of Its Production System

India, as well as other Asian countries, especially China and Thailand, has experienced a rapid growth in its automobile industry since the 1990s. One of the main reasons for this growth was the implementation of an economic liberalization policy that accelerated a huge amount of direct investment in India on the part multinational motor companies. These companies established 100%owned assembly plants or joint ventures that collaborated with local business groups. In 2002, 12 motor companies, including three Japanese ones, competed for the market shares of passenger cars and multi-utility vehicles. While the total number of vehicles produced in India has gradually increased, the scale of production per company has remained small because of severe market competition. Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM), a joint venture created by Toyota Motor Company, Japan, with the Kirloskar Group, India, was investigated in an attempt to explain the small-scale vehicle production system of an overseas Japanese automobile plant. TKM was founded on the Bidadi Industrial Estate on the outskirts of Bangalore in 1997 and started commercial production of multi-utility vehicles in 1999. Its annual vehicle production is approximately 30, 000 units, which is far fewer than those of Toyota-owned overseas plants in North America and Europe. Therefore, TKM is a suitable example for considering the above topic. TKM constructed an efficient factory to achieve cost reduction. Compared with Toyota's factory buildings in Japan, that of TKM is lower in total height and narrower in terms of aisle space. Instead of costly steel-collar robots, it utilizes manual workers in production processes like welding, painting, and body assembling. These processes are mostly automated in Japan. Some of the machinery and equipment were shifted from Toyota-owned factories in Japan or Southeast Asia to maintain a low initial investment. TKM employed an improved, “just-in-time” (JIT) system to adapt to small-scale production and the local economic environment. TKM's parts suppliers are located in agglomerations of the automobile industry in Delhi, Pune, and Chennai, as well as Bangalore. TKM purchases 70% of its parts in monetary terms from Indian branches of Toyota group companies located in Bangalore. These group companies play an important role as core suppliers to TKM. TKM employs the milk run logistics system for parts delivery to perform JIT production. The milk run system has made it possible to minimize transportation costs. TKM established a transportation company responsible for transporting its auto parts. The company travels from supplier to supplier to collect parts along its routes. After arranging the parts in a long deck truck at consolidating stations in Delhi, Pune, and Chennai, the truck is driven to TKM every day. The suppliers surveyed in Bangalore are divided into the following two types. Members of the first type are Japanese owned and established as dedicated suppliers to TKM. Members of the second type are locally owned and their business with TKM comprises a small percentage of their sales. The local suppliers have many customers that vary from vehicle manufacturers to other industrial customers. In India, the business per customer is so small that suppliers need to have many business partners and networks to make a profit. Some of the Japanese suppliers tried to expand their business relations with other customers to meet the small-scale production of TKM.

Conversion of a Foreign Company's Branch into a Representative Office in Iraq

Conversion of a Foreign Company's Branch into a Representative Office in Iraq

Masculine, feminine or neutral? In-company equal opportunities policies in Irish and French MNC retailing

Several problematic aspects of women's paid employment - e.g. low pay and lack of promotional opportunities - are exacerbated by the segregation of women and men into different occupations. In this article, the potential of in-store equal opportunities policies to break down such gender segregation will be explored, through consideration of the existence and implementation of these policies in twenty-two multinational retail companies in Dublin and Paris. It will be argued that, with one notable exception, the instore equal opportunities policies are effectively neutralized, and furthermore are neutralized in nationally specific ways which can be related to differences between France and Ireland in the organization of labour-market regulation and in women's labour-force participation (LFP). The case-study findings also suggest that the 'country' variable has a stronger effect on the existence and implementation of these policies than the extent of a shop's links to an overseas headquarters. The findings of this study have implications for both the equity of women's incorporation into the paid labour force and understanding of aspects of HRM in branches of multinational companies.

Masculine, feminine or neutral? In-company equal opportunities policies in Irish and French MNC retailing

Several problematic aspects of women's paid employment - e.g. low pay and lack of promotional opportunities - are exacerbated by the segregation of women and men into different occupations. In this article, the potential of in-store equal opportunities policies to break down such gender segregation will be explored, through consideration of the existence and implementation of these policies in twenty-two multinational retail companies in Dublin and Paris. It will be argued that, with one notable exception, the instore equal opportunities policies are effectively neutralized, and furthermore are neutralized in nationally specific ways which can be related to differences between France and Ireland in the organization of labour-market regulation and in women's labour-force participation (LFP). The case-study findings also suggest that the 'country' variable has a stronger effect on the existence and implementation of these policies than the extent of a shop's links to an overseas headquarters. The findings of this study have implications for both the equity of women's incorporation into the paid labour force and understanding of aspects of HRM in branches of multinational companies.

The Activities of General Trading Company Branch Offices in the United States Prior to World War II

The Activities of General Trading Company Branch Offices in the United States Prior to World War II

Computer-aided process planning in virtual one-of-a-kind production

This paper reports a framework for computer-aided process planning (CAPP) in virtual One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP). The emphasis will be placed on the particular problems of developing a CAPP system in virtual OKP company. A virtual manufacturing company or a manufacturing network normally consists of geographically dispersed master company's branches, sub-contractors, joint ventures, and partners. In this paper, we will address issues raised from highly customised products, the concurrent approach of product development and production through a manufacturing network, incomplete product and production data in OKP, the need for quickly capturing marketing opportunities and early response to the customer's demands, continuous customer influence upon production, the optimal selection of partners, and partner synthesis in virtual manufacturing. The CAPP framework proposed in this paper includes a reference architecture for structuring a CAPP system in virtual OKP, a new CAPP method which is named the `incremental process planning (IPP)', and an optimal/rational cost analysis model. It also includes three data models for data modelling and structuring of the product, the process, and manufacturing plants used in virtual OKP.

HIGH TIMES FOR FINE CHEMICALS

The fine chemicals industry these days looks a lot like the biotechnology industry did 20 years ago. Small firms are starting up, often organized around a single technological capability. Larger firms are looking to buy some of these smaller, specialized companies, to forge strategic alliances with them, or to establish their own entrepreneurial divisions. And everyone is chasing chemistry professors who have newly patented technology. This upbeat tone was strongly reflected in two recent meetings of the fine chemicals community—the Chiral USA 97 symposium and exposition held in Boston in May and last month's Chemical Specialities Europe 97 (ChemSpec Europe) conference and exposition in Manchester, England. Often, the technological advances by fine chemicals producers have led to processes that create less waste to treat or compounds that extend branches of companies' trees. A chemical tree is a group of compounds related to one another by their origin in a common starting material such as ...

The Mixed Blessings of Success: The Hecht Company and Department Store Branch Development after World War II

The Mixed Blessings of Success: The Hecht Company and Department Store Branch Development after World War II

Japan and the American Identity

This study originated in a concern for the relation between school and work, and later evolved into an enquiry into the nature of a democratic identity in a multicultural society. Feinberg started this project in about 1980, shortly after leaders of government and industry declared that American education was in crisis. Inferior education was thought to be one of the main causes of the growing American trade deficit and (then) declining industry (car industry and consumer electronics). Low scores on standardised tests of American students, particularly in comparison with those of Japanese students, were seen as a sign of the decline of education and as a possible explanation of the lack of productivity of American industry. Both the high scores on tests of the Japanese students and the impressive achievements of Japanese industry were seen as proof of the thesis that good education produces good workers. In those years a growing numbers of ‘transplants’, as the branches of Japanese companies are called, settled down in the United States. The Japanese children who came along with their parents were placed in the neighbouring public schools. This enabled Feinberg (Professor of Philosophy of Education and Director of the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) to subject the relationship between education and labour market/industry to analysis. For this purpose he interviewed many Japanese parents and children, in the US as well as after their return to Japan. Though Feinberg was still interested in the relationship between school achievement and industrial productivity, there was a shift in his research question: what do the achievements of Japanese scholars and workers mean for America, and why do they carry the meaning that they have? One of the reasons for this shift in the definition of the problem was that Feinberg had the feeling that the economic issues had come to be of minor importance, and that behind all the attention on Japan lies a concern for America’s own identity and moral character. Consequently his central question became:

The structural theory of business demand: a reply to Hughes

I need to start by correcting Howard Hughes’s understanding of my Structural Theory of Business Demand (Howard L. Hughes, The structural theory of business demand: a comment, I. 1. Hosp. Man. 12,309-311). Whereas the proportion of GDP from services and the proportion of the workforce in services are necessary conditions for the growth of business demand in hotels, they are not sufficient. The progression from phase I to phase II in the structural theory also requires the emergence of national chains of service businesses and Hughes has chosen to ignore this feature of the theory. When retail chains, financial services chains, professional services chains, wholesaling chains and, indeed, hospitality chains develop a national spread then the secular growth of business demand into hotels progresses apace as it has done in the USA and the UK. In the structural theory it is not just the proportion of services in an economy, but also the structure of the service economy which is necessary for the acceleration of business demand. There are three main types of business demand which are prominent when an economy develops service chains. First, the emergence of service chains such as retailers and wholesalers, requires a cohort of corporate executives from across the full range of management functions who need to spend a proportion of their time interacting with company branches across the country and this produces demand into hotels. In service chains there is a greater proportion of corporate executives travelling on business more frequently than there is in extractive, manufacturing or state controlled services. Secondly, financial and professional services companies, which are nationally and internationally based, require business travel at a greater frequency than extractive or manufacturing companies to service clients and this adds to hotel demand. Thirdly, service chains use hotels as quasi offices in which company meetings, training courses and strategy courses are held. Hughes is right to record that several developing countries have the majority of GDP derived from services, but much of this is state controlled services and these countries do not have national chains of service businesses. Therefore they do not have sufficient conditions to trigger secular growth in business demand. Hughes did not mention that the structural theory explained why business demand into

Stress containment through meditation

Summary After demonstrating the effectiveness of meditation training for stress reduction in an occupational setting, the Medical Department at New York Telephone adopted a semi‐automated training program in this technique as part of the company's regular Employee Health Maintenance Program. The meditation training program has been implemented in all company branches throughout the state of New York and is presently available to all employees within the company who, in the opinion of the medical staff, are suffering from stress and are suitable candidates for meditation training. Over 3,500 individuals have been through the program.

ENERGY SAVING in transportation and engineering

In 1980 diesel oil will cost the National Freight Corporation about £42 million, and other energy requirements an additional £71 million, representing an important part of its total operating costs. Any worthwhile savings that can be made will have a marked effect on profitability. Since the relative cost of diesel oil is likely to increase it is necessary to look at other aspects of the operation in order to bring about these savings. In this paper the author looks at three principal areas: methods of improving fuel consumption; an examination of the use of alternative fuels to find out if any of these are technically feasible; and to examine methods of fuel saving and energy in the operating branches of NFC companies.

Segmental Disclosures by Multibusiness Multinational Companies: a Proposal

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the segmental disclosures by multi-business multinational companies. Several bases are available for identifying segments. The company may be segmented in terms of the industries in which it operates, the product lines or services offered, the markets served, or the geographical areas in which it is involved. Alternatively, the segments may be identified in accordance with the organization structure of the enterprise such as by division, department, branch, or subsidiary. The distinction between industry and product line is blurred in practice because industrial classification reflects an aggregation of related products and services. The identification of segments consistent with the company's subsidiaries, divisions, departments, or branches offers an alternative basis for disclosure. When the organizational unit does not coincide with an industry, product line, market, or geographical area, disclosure by these means may be regarded as inconsistent with the needs of external users.

Role of Foreign Capital in India

WHAT is the extent of foreign private capital in the Indian economy? Is it growing over time? These are the questions discussed in this article. Some suggestive, but by no means conclusive, evidence regarding the impact of foreign capital will also be presented. The major foreign companies operating in India are generally subsidiaries or associates of giant transnationals conducting business on a global scale. While assets within India may form a small part of the worldwide complex and may not always be very large in relation to many an Indian company, the economic power enjoyed by such a subsidiary could be considerably greater; the size of Indian assets might understate the relative importance of such subsidiaries. Nevertheless, in the Indian context many of the foreign companies have been very large.1 Of the top 20 monopoly or large business houses (LBH) listed by the Dutt Committee there were three foreign groups, namely, Andrew Yule, Bird-Heilgers and ICI: their assets in 1966 were, in million rupees, 467, 688 and 501 respectively. At least three foreign branch (FB) companies, not included among the top 20 LBHs, were considerably larger than many of the monopoly houses figuring in that list; these were Burmah-Shell (Rs 793 million), the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation(Rs 632 million) and Esso (Rs 426 million). However, the two oil companies have recently

THE COST STRUCTURE OF CONSUMER FINANCE SMALL-LOAN OPERATIONS

THE SOCIAL and economic implications of personal borrowing and a renewed interest in consumerism have brought attention to many aspects of consumer finance. The cost behavior of small-loan operations is one of the major factors in the evaluation of regulations for the small-loan industry. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an empirical investigation of the cost structure of consumer finance company loan branches and to discuss the results in the context of regulations on the licensing of small-loan operations and rate regulations. The scale economies issue and the loan size-cost relationship are of particular interest in this discussion. The present results are compared with previous research on the cost of small-loan operations of consumer finance companies and an attempt is made to clarify some apparent conflicts in the analysis of the scale economies issue. Present results are compared also with cost studies of commercial bank instalment loan departments. Because of the similarity of the operations in the two cases, the results are expected to be basically similar with respect to the scale economies issue.