Assignment II - Web Search Assignment

Submitted by: Nirajan Ghimire (167027)

1. Find out the example of any company that has exercised

•Pause Proceed strategy t

Pause proceed strategy is a business strategy that businesses employ to slow down and stop their

growth deliberately. This is done usually by companies who are trying to apply some large scale

strategies or by the companies that have gone through a lot of growth and changes in strategies in

order to slow down and look at the changes and effects o the strategies that were employed. The

purpose is to allow all the people in the organization to adapt to the changes. This strategy could

be also called the strategy of the opportunists as they wait for the opportune moment to proceed

with the new strategies.

An example of this is the pause proceed strategy taken by Association of American Cancer

Institutes during 2006. The strategic pause was taken in order to reflect on the tremendous

growth that they had been having since 1999. The pause was intended to both evaluate their

progress and plan for new initiatives that they would leverage from the already considerable

influence of their cancer centers and best address the key challenges their members would face in

the next 3 to 5 years. So, in summary they took a pause from their growth to look back on their

old strategies and to plan new strategies for the future and to proceed with executing those new

strategies.
•Turnaround strategy

Turnaround strategy means to convert, change or transform a loss-making company into a profit

making company. It helps the sick company to stand once again in the market and tries to reverse

the position from declining sales to increasing sales, from weakness to strength, and from an

instability to stability.

An example for this strategy would be the Dell company. During 2006 when Dell announced the

cost-cutting measures by selling its products directly it started to suffer a huge loss. It had no

choice but to rethink its strategies and come up with a plan to rise to a profitable position again.

And to do this, Dell stopped the previous strategy of direct sales and went towards retail sales.

This helped to boost its sales and grow the company even further.

2. Find out the example of any company that has restructured or survived the liquidation.

Explain how they were rescued.

An example of a company that survived liquidation is Marvel Entertainment. It filed for

bankruptcy in 1996 but currently it is known as one of the biggest companies that produces

movies, television shows, comics, toys and more. After the comic book bubble burst in the mid-

1990’s, Marvel was forced to declare bankruptcy. When the company went bankrupt, it was

forced to sell-off film rights of some of its most popular franchises. And Marvel saw its own

properties used by other studios like fox to make millions through the movies.

The board members of Marvel were highly risk averse and didn’t want to risk anything by

getting into movie production. But in this time Avi Arad, who defeated Ronald Perelman and

Carl Icahn in bankruptcy court to win control of Marvel, managed to win an argument against
corporate board members. With his COO, David Maisel, Arad was able to arrange a $525 million

credit line for Marvel to make its own films from Merrill Lynch. This credit was to be used to

produce movies using characters wholly owned by Marvel. There was only one catch: if the

films didn’t make money, Merrill Lynch would acquire the rights to the properties and

presumably sell them off to the highest bidder. It was the last chance for Marvel.

Using the money marvel went on to buy off rights of its original characters it had sold earlier,

one of which was Ironman. With everything riding on that one movie, marvel decided to use one

of its lesser known characters Ironman to produce a movie. And this gamble paid off. After the

movie released in 2008, it started a whole era of superhero movies led by Marvel itself with

multiple franchises in both movies and television. This was helped by the fact that it merged with

Disney corporation in 2009. Marvel then went on to make movies that took in box office

numbers in billions of dollars and it continues to do so.