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Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year. It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year. Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%. Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy. According to the passage, Niall FitzGerald
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If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money It’s not that different from how other software companies make money. You’d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you’d be wrong. For one thing, companies don’t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter. But what’s the value of a license to a customer A license doesn’t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn’t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft- ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel mom, a smart tech buyer won’t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement. Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft’s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft’s subscription program, known as Soft- ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up- grade to Microsoft’s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don’t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade Chief information officers hate this kind of *’assurance", since they’re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft’s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That’s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don’t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write. According to the passage Microsoft
Illiteracy may be considered more as an abstract concept than a condition. When a famous English writer used the (1) over two hundred years ago, he was actually (2) to people who could (3) read Greek or Latin. (4) ,it seems unlikely that university examiners had this sort of (5) in mind when they reported on "creeping illiteracy" in a report on their students’ final examination in 1988. (6) the years, university lecturers have been (7) of an increasing tendency towards grammatical sloppiness, poor spelling and general imprecision (8) their students’ ways of writing; and sloppy writing is all (9) often a reflection of sloppy thinking. Their (10) was that they had (11) to do teaching their own subject (12) teaching their undergraduates to write. Some lecturers believe that they have a (n) (13) to stress the importance of maintaining standards of clear thinking (14) the written word in a world dominated by (15) communications and images. They (16) on the connection between clear thinking and a form of writing that is not only clear, but also sensitive to (17) of meaning. The same lecturers argue that undergraduates appear to be the victims of a "softening process" that begins (18) the teaching of English in schools, but this point of view has, not (19) , caused a great deal of (20) . 5（）
Illiteracy may be considered more as an abstract concept than a condition. When a famous English writer used the (1) over two hundred years ago, he was actually (2) to people who could (3) read Greek or Latin. (4) ,it seems unlikely that university examiners had this sort of (5) in mind when they reported on "creeping illiteracy" in a report on their students’ final examination in 1988. (6) the years, university lecturers have been (7) of an increasing tendency towards grammatical sloppiness, poor spelling and general imprecision (8) their students’ ways of writing; and sloppy writing is all (9) often a reflection of sloppy thinking. Their (10) was that they had (11) to do teaching their own subject (12) teaching their undergraduates to write. Some lecturers believe that they have a (n) (13) to stress the importance of maintaining standards of clear thinking (14) the written word in a world dominated by (15) communications and images. They (16) on the connection between clear thinking and a form of writing that is not only clear, but also sensitive to (17) of meaning. The same lecturers argue that undergraduates appear to be the victims of a "softening process" that begins (18) the teaching of English in schools, but this point of view has, not (19) , caused a great deal of (20) . 1（）
Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever’s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year. It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets’ own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ( $ 4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.7% for the second quarter of this year. Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com- moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers’ own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers’ own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli’s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%. Unilever’s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy. Which of the following about "Path to Growth" strategy is true
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