Sunday 3 February 2008

Three Spectacular Economic Events and Execution of Strategies(Some failed too..)

Anyone who is closely following the world news would have understood the significance of three major events of last couple of weeks

a) Jerome Kerviel , the rogue trader who vandalised billions of Soc Gen
b) Chinalco's Audacious bid for Rio Tinto and
c) Microsoft's bid for Yahoo

The three events are seemingly interconnected by depicts the dawn of new era where the strenous effects to succedd pushes you beyond the imaginations

Lets have a closer look at these events ,
Jerome Kerviel was an un assuming back office guy who on a chance became a trade floor guy and traded beyond limits using fake hedges, Awesome, how was it allowed in the first place?
It has paved a new way for the predatory take over guys like BNP, Credit Agricole etc for some action.

Monsieur's of Soc Gen must have been busy attending concerts in La Opera while Eurex send them a warning,

After all french didnt bother about Hitlers' rise and were asking for evidences of his wrong doing....


Chinalco's dawn raid using Lehmans has been a phenomenal 007 kind of a story , they just knocked of $14 bn of Rio's stock(nearly 12%) under its nose on a day when BHP was still strategising for a formal bid, dude this world is for and by fast movers. Its really amazing to see what free economy allows you to do and all it takes is to come up with a bold strategy and strong way to execute.
The masterpiece of execution was to use Lehman Brother's do the hard work and having Alcoa by the side to thwart any foul cries. The bid looks very smart and cunningly executed as if Sun-Tzu was in the take over bid, May be we should expect more from the dragon country in the coming days.

MS's bold new initiative has been the second biggest tech take over (first being AOL's take over on Time Warner for 112.some billion $), and its sad to see a company of yahoo's stature going out to be eaten away without a choice-This could be their best choice-am sure they can figure out a way to improve the business by 61% as offered by Microsoft.
MS has lost millions in catching up game with Google and this would be a feast to all of us to see the corporate strategic minds to battle the Google.


It is really thoughtful to analyse these events on similar or opposite grounds
Jerome Kerviel was a failed trader, the act is over and lost (atleast for him)
Chinalco's bid is over and it would be interesting to the aftermath efforts
MS-Yahoo deal is still brewing and would be interesting to watch in the coming days.
Its amazing to understand or atleast to witness the corporate strategic decisions in actions and am sure they are worth following for our own learning as well.
Thanks to the new world, life is never dull and lets keep watching all of these events......

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.