Can you answer this question please,

4. Identify and describe the strategy which is being followed by CEO Lampert and comment on features which would benefit the company at this time. (10 marks)

the details of the case are posted below:

The Retailers Problem Those 110 Sears and Macy's stores that have been marked for closure are only the beginning. As department store chains cede market share to off-price, fast-fashion and online competitors, they would need to close about 800 locations to achieve their inflation-adjusted sales productivity level of 2006, according to Green Street's 2017 Mall Outlook. That's the equivalent of all anchor space at 200 malls, or 20 percent of U.S. mall anchor space, according to the report. Sears began life as a catalogue company in 1886 and over the next century grew to become a retail behemoth, selling everything from appliances and clothes to car repairs. The 130-year-old company operates one of America's best-known department store brands, Sears, Roebuck & Company, along with the ubiquitous Kmart chain, and was America's largest retail company until 1989. Sears and J.C. Penney are the biggest culprits behind the industry's sales productivity gap, Green Street said in its report. Sears needs to close 44 percent of its stores to reach 2006 productivity levels, and Penney's needs to close 32 percent of its locations. While Sears has been proactive in shuttering unprofitable stores, Penney's has been slower to trim its fleet. The company exited just seven locations last year. It has only four unprofitable stores, according to a separate report by Cowen and Company. Penney's has not made any formal announcements about how many stores it will close this year. However, at a recent real estate conference in Dallas, CEO Marvin Ellison said the company will soon take action. A J.C. Penney spokesperson reiterated that the company has not yet announced details regarding potential store closures in 2017. In his research note, Cowen analyst Oliver Chen agreed that Penney's could eventually cut its fleet by roughly 30 percent, to free up money to invest in its best stores. That would leave it with some 700 locations. "It is uglier this year," Garrick Brown, vice president of retail research for the Americas at Cushman & Wakefield, recently said about the bricks-and-mortar retail industry. "I expect the closures to be worse, and I expect the malls to be hit more than any other shopping center type." This isn't the first time Green Street has called out the number of department stores that need to close to restore their previous productivity levels. Last year, the firm also concluded that roughly 800 stores needed to close, though the numbers varied for individual retailers.

Sears didn't all go up in smoke. Over the last decade, Lampert has spun off Lands' End (LE), Sears Canada (SRSC), Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores (SHOS) and most of the real estate. He's still seeking buyers for DieHard, Craftsman and Kenmore he may find them. He just gave the stores a $200 million loan, which could go to $500 million, and will have lent $1 billion to Sears in two years. Lampert was once called "the next Warren Buffett," but the original one knew what was coming for Sears a decade ago. "Can you think of an example of a retailer that was successfully turned around?" he asked in 2006. JC Penney (JCP) shareholders take note, please.) One number tells the tale. Department stores need margins of 35% to survive, given their overhead. Costco Wholesale (COST) gets by on about 10%. I'm going to Costco. Fitch Ratings says Sears has blown through $1.6 billion in cash over the last year, and needs $2 billion to keep the doors open all year. Reportedly, Kmart employees are being laid off to save on cash, but the company is, frankly, on the brink. Why Sears Failed A century ago, Sears was the primary innovator in retail. It was Amazon.com (AMZN) before there was an Amazon. Atlanta's biggest new attraction, called Ponce Market, was built inside a onetime Sears catalog center. When Sears opened a new store in a new city, it was once a big deal it meant people there had made it. When Americans moved to the suburbs, in the 1960s, Sears followed them, and its urban stores began closing. When America started going to big-box stores, there was Kmart, which SHLD bought in 2004 for $11 billion. For a time, customers followed. Three major companies killed Sears. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) was killing Kmart long before Sears bought it. Amazon, of course, built efficient e-commerce infrastructure after SHLD had dismantled its. Costco was the final nail in the coffin. You can add a few other suspects to the line-up W.W. Grainger (GWW) for business purchases, Gap (GPS) and Best Buy (BBY) in those verticals. The spinoff of the credit card unit into Discover Financial Services (DFS) didn't help. Business is a dog-eat-dog world, and Sears has gotten chewed up. But mainly it was what Buffett said a decade ago. Retailers are nothing without their reputation. If you're not known as the best, the best quality or the best value, you're nothing. Malls don't have that reputation, and department stores don't have that reputation. Or as Professor Harold Hill sang in The Music Man, "the Uneeda biscuit in the airtight sanitary package made the cracker barrel obsolete." You change or you die, no matter how big you are. Sears didn't change. Now it must die. Because the firm has recently found itself in a crisis as it struggles to turn a profit as Americans increasingly shop online rather than in shopping centres. In January, the company behind the group said it was selling off a major subsidiary and shutting more than 100 stores in an attempt to bolster its finances. Some analysts believe that, short of a miracle, Sears Holdings will go under within the next few years. So how did things go so wrong, and can the business do anything to turn itself around? Neil Saunders, chief executive of Conlumino, a retail research agency in New York, says the firm's "biggest problem" is that the US retail landscape has changed dramatically. "One of the fundamentals is that people shop more online and less in malls, which is where Sears' stores are usually located," he tells the BBC. The second problem is that Sears hasn't invested in its retail outlets for a long time - that includes its staff, new products and innovation." This has come at a time of unprecedented competition from online shopping giants such as Amazon. cBut while peers like JC Penney and Macy's have tried to stay fresh, Sears has not kept up, says Mr Saunders. "Shoppers have changed drastically in the past several years and now demand so much more from retailers across the board, from both a digital and physical perspective," adds Tiffany Hogan, an expert on US retail at Kantar Retail. "Sears has great name recognition in the US and was strong for so long, but has not capitalised on that name to the fullest to keep the chain relevant." 'Long-term transformation' Sears Holdings' chief executive, Eddie Lampert, says the firm is in the midst of a "long-term transformation" to succeed both online and through its stores. He is also banking on the company's rewards programme, Shop Your Way, where frequent buyers accumulate points for their Sears and Kmart purchases and turn them into coupons and discounts. However, none of this has made the firm profitable and it is heavily in debt. In response, Sears has put forward a turnaround plan involving selling off its Craftsman tool brand for around $900m, closing 150 stores, and borrowing hundreds of millions from Mr Lampert's hedge fund ESL, which is also Sears' biggest investor. Shares in the firm picked up on the news but have since eased back; analysts do not seem convinced, either. Moody's Christina Boni says the company had been supporting itself by selling off assets, "but obviously that can't last forever". Matt McGinley from the investment bank Evercore ISI told Bloomberg earlier in January: "I don't think there is any viable path to any sort of profitability." Sears Holdings will not comment on "rumour and speculation" about its future, but tells the BBC: "We believe that we have the resources to fund our transformation and meet all of our financial obligations." Wider impacts If, as some expect, the firm does go under it could have wider repercussions Holdings' chief "Even with just the 150 stores Sears has confirmed it will close, the local impacts [in the US] could be significant as Sears will leave a large footprint that US malls have to fill with alternative businesses," Ms Hogan says. Yet Sears is not alone in its struggles, she says: "Across the landscape we're seeing retailers struggle with 'keeping up with the Jones's'... Women's clothing store chain the Limited just closed its doors, and a handful of other mall-based retailers are likely to follow in the next couple of years." Ms Boni says that closures might be no bad thing, though. "The US is currently 'over-stored', so we are beginning to see a flush out with store closures across many competitors. "To that end it's a natural part of the cycle, and the long-term effect of stores shuttering isn't necessarily a bad thing."