Hello everyone, and welcome to the management economics and business analysis capstone. For this capstone project, you are a consulting company or a representative of the consulting company, and you are advising a major US-based or a global manufacturing consumer company to select an emerging economy or a developing economy for international expansion. This is a pretty sizable investment opportunity of Foreign Direct Investment of approximately $350 million. This is a pretty intense four module project. So you should be prepared for that. It will require you to demonstrate knowledge and skills into three different areas; microeconomics, macroeconomics, and statistics. As a part of this capstone course, you will produce several intermediate milestone reports as well as a final report. This is your opportunity to engage in this mini-consulting project in which you'll be demonstrating all of those skills. So what's the process that we will be following here? Here it is. In Module 1 you're selecting your company and product, and you're also identifying the geographic expansion opportunities for your company. In Module 2, you are moving onto analyze and contrast macroeconomic environments in the two countries that you're choosing as your top candidates. In Module 3, it's time for you to look at the microeconomic environments, and finally in Module 4, you're putting everything together from the previous three modules to produce a final report, and to make a thoughtful recommendation for expansion for your board of directors. So what are the objectives of our capstone? They are as follows. So first of all you'll be working with data, this is where statistics comes in. So you should be able to locate some pretty credible sources of both macroeconomic and microeconomic data, and just as importantly use this data to support fairly complex business decisions. In the macroeconomic part of this course you will be analyzing the macroeconomic environment to assess short-term and long-term investment and operational risks. You will be analyzing the market potentials from the perspective of supply and demand, that is, you're looking at your competition, who your competitors are, and you are looking at your customers to identify the impact of those two sides of the supply and demand and equilibrium on your potential profit. Finally, you're going to make a search based and theory informed recommendations for action. That will rely on knowledge and methods from all three of those areas. Let's spend a little bit more time on the overview of our four milestones in this course. Milestone 1 is probably one of the more intense milestones in the course. You're doing a few things in here. You're selecting a company, probably something that's you're going to be fairly interested in. You are selecting a product that you're going to be interested in or at least a line of products potentially that the company producing, and then you're going to identify a number of countries that are classified as countries that don't belong to the high-income countries by the World Bank, and you are using statistical analysis to figure out which ones of those 10 countries you're going to select as your top two candidates for this project. Once you've done that, and once you move to Milestone 2, you're going to conduct macroeconomic analysis of those two countries, and contrast their microeconomic performance, and as a result of this work you should be getting a pretty strong sense of how risky an investment in those countries maybe so that you can communicate this information to your board of directors, and how well your countries are doing and those key macroeconomic variables. Then you're moving on to Milestone 3. So Milestone 3, now deals if microeconomic data, and so what is microeconomics? Well, our key microeconomic model that we've used is that of supply and demand. So you'll be analyzing the demand of your portfolio product in each country using the framework of determinants of demand, you'll be analyzing the supply of your product using determinants of supply as your framework as well, and then you're going to compare and contrast the two countries again. So this is going to help you quite a bit to figure out what is going to be the potential for being profitable in those two markets, and it will also help you to figure out what strategy you should be pursuing in those markets. Would you be pursuing a strategy of a cost leadership, or would you be trying to make your product unique and to distinguish it from what other sellers are offering out there in the marketplace. Then it's on to Milestone 4, this is it. This is where you're making that final recommendation for the selection of one country out of those two, and this is your submitting and defending that final report to the board of directors. You're integrating all of the work that you've done through the previous milestones, and the feedback that you received from your peers in those milestones, and that's your final deliverable for this capstone course. So with this in mind, let's get started and see you in the rest of the course.
