The objective of the integrated semester is to help you extend your knowledge of how the finance, operations, management, and marketing disciplines work, and how they integrate their functioning in the real world of business. This assignment is an assessment of how well you understand this integration. It is worth 10% of your course grade.
Please read all the instructions carefully before beginning to answer the questions. Contact your instructor if you don’t understand the assignments requirements. The assignment must be submitted as instructed. You will lose points if you fail to follow the instructions or if the submission is formatted incorrectly.
Please make sure to read the two cases about Disney before you answer the below questions. Use either the Bloomberg terminals located at the Feliciano School of Business or other reputable sources such as finance.yahoo.com, morningstar.com or Wall Street Journal etc. for the financial data you use in your answers. You need to provide the references regarding the financial data you use at the end of the finance portion of the term paper.
1. In 2016, Disney opened its latest theme park, the Shanghai Disney Resort. Assume that Disney is considering launching another major theme park in a foreign country. This will be a major capital budgeting project for the firm. An undertaking of this scale requires coordinated planning across all functions of a business that you are studying in your Integrated Core classes. Choose and discuss three items on the income statement that you think that this new undertaking will impact. Explain why you chose those particular items, and how the marketing, management and operations decisions of the company affect these items.
- 2. The textbook authors discuss a variety of financial ratios, and divide them into five categories. Choose and calculate three financial ratios from three different categories for Disney for the last two years. Make sure to select ratios that you think that opening a new theme park in a foreign country will affect and explain your reasoning. Identify a competitor of Disney and contrast these three ratios for the two companies over the two recent years. Explain why you selected this competitor. Describe how the decisions made by management, marketing and operations functions of the company can effect, and hopefully improve, these financial ratios.
- 3. Disney is a company with a significant brand value that is closely tied to its family friendly image. Discuss how any violations of business ethics in the company might affect its investors, customers and employees, and ultimately impact the company’s overall financial performance. Provide examples, if you’d like, to support your answer.
Questions: The assignment should be prepared as a Word document, 3-4 pages in length
- The document should be double-spaced, using Arial font #12.
- Add any appendices or references at the end of the Word document for each discipline separately.
- Upload the appropriate Word file through the link on Canvas to each of your Integrated Semester courses separately by the due date (i.e. the Marketing assignment should only be uploaded to your Marketing class).
- Your reference sources, in addition to the base case and question sets, should be online sites and articles, Bloomberg terminals, your Integrated Semester textbooks, PowerPoint slides, and other sources your professor assigns.
- Turnitin, a software tool that improves writing and prevents plagiarism, will be used to assess your sourcing of information. Do your own work.