Fairfax Media Executive Summary: Fairfax media, originally John Fairfax and Sons, was founded by John Fairfax in 1941 and for over 170 years has grown to become one of Australia’s largest media companies. The company’s operations include the distribution of newspapers, magazines, radio as well as operating digital media throughout Australia and New Zealand. Some notable figures from Fairfax Media’s current Board of Directors include company chairman Roger Corbett, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Greg Hywood and Chief Financial Officer, David Housego. This report provides a situational analysis regarding the current stage the business’s lifecycle and the internal and external influences on the business. This is followed by an overview of both the short and long-term goals that the company is currently aspiring to achieve in the future and an evaluation of the key financial indicators (ratios) used to determine the company’s liquidity, solvency, profitability and efficiency. This will be accompanied by a suitable strategy to be applied to effectively improve each ratio. Situational Analysis: PLC: Fairfax media has reached the post maturity stage in the product life cycle and is beginning to decline due to the high expenses that are a result of the business’s structural layout. This issue is being addressed through the “Fairfax of the Future” program which was introduced to reduce the company’s cost base through strategic operational changes. SWOT: Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats Leading publisher in Australia and New Zealand. Is a Reputable, large scale business in the media industry Partnership with call centre for customers (Teletech) Cost issues Weakness in marketing sector High overhead Low ret... ... middle of paper ... ...ement must be aware of what each cost has influence over, rather than diminishing the uppermost expense, as this may result in various consequences such as a decrease in efficiency due to an inadequate amount of resources, which completely defeats the purpose of cost cuts and may also spark a decline in its market due to poor quality. By reinvesting the money extracted from one sector into another aspect, such as upgrading to more innovative technology to further increase both efficiency and savings. Conclusion: The analysis of Fairfax Media’s financial situation has provided an insight on the business’s decisions to adapt to the ever changing influences on the business environment. Although the business has struggled with financial difficulty over the year’s large debts and net losses, the company has managed to develop an increasingly stable financial position.
Cost management plays a major role when maintaining profit margins. Management must be able to find in which areas of a business costs must be reduced and the consequences that such reductions have in the overall company. In some situations management must change the way the work is being done in order to decrease costs while in other cases changing one supplier for another might be enough, in both situations a tradeoff will occur and the consequences will impact the company as a whole.
With an understanding of the theoretical links between economic structures, relations of production, and political systems that protect economic structures in society this case study examines media as a contributor to democracy in Australia as well as a business with economic objectives. This section will provide a short explanation of Fairfax media history and position in 2012 prior to explaining Gina Rinehart’s role in the company. The print sector in Australia has historically exhibited relatively high levels of concentration, dominated by News Corp Australia, Fairfax and APN. The Australian print news media have experienced a long-term trend of a decrease in titles and owners. According to Geoffrey Craig, ‘in 1923 there were as many as
...t is also difficult to maintain overall operations. Operations are effected simply because of health care delivering patient care which significantly declines when the overall cost continues to raise.
BHP Billiton is the most successful company throughout the world by using unchanged strategies in their business. They have a strategy to operate large, low cost, expandable, and upstream commodities by using raw materials, geography, different assets and market, which give them a superior marginal costs throughout economic and commodity cycles for several years. They put the security of their workers first and supporting them by providing various facilities (see appendix 1). Their diversification makes the easy cash flow system by reducing the exposure to any one commodity and give for more identifiable and great financial performances. To become more successful BHP have heaps of human resources or workforce which reflect their values and communities. They have aim to recruit and attract other people who make their organization successful and thrive on working in teams and going to their extra miles to give their best. Moreover, they are committed to meet the changing needs of their customers. They have world class portfolio of growth option that will make them able to plan for a short term and long term goals and continuing them to create value for their shareholders which BHP more powerful (BHP Billiton, 2014). By using these all measures BHP Billiton kept its solid position in the nine month period till the end of March 2014 with the record of production attained for four items and at 10 operations. In aggregate, processing expanded by 10% for throughout the period what's more is required to develop by 16% over the two years to the end of the 2015 fiscal year. For further development BHP having a plan to start new projects where they pursuing a higher rate of returns on incremental investment and increasing inter...
Organizational changes that reduce cost. The M&S reduced its management levels to reduce the cost.
The industry has had its share of ups and downs. During the early years, the press took off with the creation of the penny press. Another insurgence of profitability came with the onset of “yellow journalism.” However, revenues declined during the Great Depression and new competition from radio hurt the industry. From 1929 to 1933, advertising revenue dropped 45%. Then in the 1960s, with the popularity of television, the newspaper industry took another...
consumption reductions. Additional manufacturing cost reductions will be essential to maintain, or better grow the
Evaluating a company’s financial condition can be done by looking at its profitability or its ability to satisfy long-term commitments. These measures can be viewed through an analysis of a company’s financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement. This paper will look at the status of Scholastic Company’s (Scholastic) ability to satisfy its long-term commitments and at the profitability of Daktronics, Inc. (Daktronics). This paper will include various financial ratio calculations and an analysis of the notable trends. It will also discuss the profitability and long-term borrowing positions of the firms discussed.
Fahey is facing the declining sales of print media as in North America, NG magazine revenues fell from $23 billion in 2004 to $20 billion in 2009. Advertising sales have declined by 30-40% in 2009 as compared to 2007. Membership feeling among customers, which was a prime focus of the company once, is deteriorating and customer are seeing it as a mere subscription. Employee satisfaction is also going down and employees see poor conflict resolution and marketing decisions that did not make sense to employees. The dispersed digital initiatives which have been taken up to fulfil the growing need to go digital is not generating enough revenues and there is tough competition with global giants in digital content publishing world who have enormous amount of resources. Fahey wants to monetize their operations even more to propel the future growth. Another striking challenge Fahey is facing is that different product units are focusing on their own channel rather than NSG as a whole to generate content which will...
This means that media conglomerates are generally oriented to focus on certain media content which would expand their market and satisfy the essential economic interests of owners. The media ownership concentration also leads to the profit-making attitude of the media content which sometimes results in promotion of certain content which is more profitable and will make more money. Time Warner is no exception in regard of its capitalistic approach towards journalism and media. “...Mega media giant Time Warner, which clearly looks at journalism as a profit center, not as serving the information needs of the nation. “ (McCall, 2014) This could be avoided if more emphasis of media corporations owning journalism would consider that journalism, even though is business, has a more important function than to increase the earnings. (McCall,
The entire newspaper industry is in a period of uncertainty, including the nations top performing newspapers. USA Today is among the best newspapers, yet the company is struggling to maintain readership. In a world where consumers have information available to them at the click of a button, USA Today has attempted to keep up with new trends in information consumption (Ferrell & Hartline, 2011).
Every company has some kind of Revenue and they all have costs that are associated with running the company. It is also true that if a company wants to increase their Revenue, their costs will increase too. It is every company’s goal to maximize revenue and either through Production or Services, and minimize cost. These things are easy to figure out, but actually identifying the production and figuring out how it will increase or decrease with change is very difficult.
Although the future of newspapers and print media is very gloomy right now I think that once the newspapers that were revered and respected in their heyday develop a model that can incorporate and transition traditional news along with current web and online media at a reasonable rate and with the high quality that we have been known to expect I think that newspapers will make a surprising comeback and will be once again at the head to the public sphere and will be viable and thriving online entities.
There are many contradictory arguments about cross-media ownership. Some people said it is an effective way to manage media company. Also, some people argue that a media company can offer high quality information and product since they have broad network and huge capital. This information and product cannot be made with small capital. However, there are concerns that media concentration affects our society negatively.
Finally, observing the traditional organizations and how they used to associate themselves to the physical forms by which they distributed their products – television broadcasting company, radio broadcasting company, newspaper, book or magazine publisher. Recently, these media firms had to restructure their business in order to be successful in this digital world. Hence, they had to widen their delivery medium rather than limiting it, and be exploiters of content wherever content is available to be exploited.