Enager Company Essay

858 Words2 Pages

History
Enager Industries, Inc. (“Enager”) is a young company with three major divisions: Consumer Products, Industrial Products, and Professional Services. The oldest division is Consumer Products and it designs, manufactures, and markets household items that are primarily used in the kitchen. The Industrial Products division manufactures one of a kind tools that are made to order that meet a company’s required specifications. Lastly, the Professional Services division provides land planning, landscape and structural architect, and an engineer-consulting firm. The divisions were looked upon as individual companies; however, any new project proposal that required investment in excess of $1,500,000 had to be reviewed by the chief financial …show more content…

In his book “Wall Street Words: An A to Z Guide to Investment Terms for Today's Investor,” David Scott (2003) claims that a conglomeration is “designed to have reduced risk.” Additionally he further writes, “It is possible for a conglomeration to redistribute its corporate assets depending on which operations show the best promise.” The creation of conglomerates in the United States was very popular in the 1960s and then again in the 1990s.
The early 1990s saw a recession that was caused by many different financial stimuli. For example, in October 1987, Black Monday caused a stock market collapse that resulted in the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 22.6 percent. Although the economy bounced back, long-term effects such as the collapse of the savings and loans institutions took hold. The next recession that struck soon after this initial panic was more far-reaching because it affected countries worldwide (Bancroft Library, 2011). …show more content…

Joshua Kennon (2006) points out that profit centers measure their overall contribution of a division’s profitability to the parent corporation, while investment centers measure all the uses of capital against a theoretical rate of return. Now, when Hubbard pressed Randall to change the company’s divisional strategy, this allowed for ROA measuring defined as a ratio of a division’s net income and total assets.
A brief analysis has shown that although there was a change pertaining to the acceptance of new projects, the denial of Mrs. McNeil’s recent project proposal should not have happened. Even though Mrs. McNeil demonstrated that her proposal would produce an ROA of 13 percent, Hubbard rejected it because it did not meet the 15 percent return he set for all the divisions despite the fact that there definitely was an increase in the overall profitability of the company and the consumer division. Hence, if the decision was centered on an increase of ROA and the consumer division’s ROA was 10.8%, then a new project with a 13% ROA would most definitely increase a division’s ROA. Therefore, projects of this nature should be accepted. This tends to lead one to believe that the change from profit centers to investment centers, with an evaluation centering on ROA, was not a proper

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