Milestone 1 Overview: Selecting Company/Product and Identifying Geographic Expansion Opportunities

Overview

You have two objectives in this milestone:

Identify a company and product that you would like to work with for this project.

Identify potential geographic expansion opportunities among countries not included in the high-income classification by the World Bank

Company and Product Selection Requirements

The company may be based in the United States or in another country. However, the company must be large enough to have appropriate financial base for making the investment; and there should be enough information available about the company in the public domain, such as its financial statements, information about its operations, etc.

The product must be a physical product and must require at least some manufacturing, assembly, or production activities in the target country for FDI investment. You should not select services or digital content as the subject of your capstone.

The product must be distributed in the target country and/or in the geographic region that includes the target country. For example, you may make a case for locating your production facility in Brazil and plan to distribute the product in South America.

For larger companies, you should be specific about the type of product that you select. Multinational companies typically produce a portfolio of products; and you must select a specific product group/line to be used for this international investment opportunity.

The board of directors has indicated that they expect to commit approximately $350 million in the selected country in manufacturing, assembly, production, and other activities.

A few examples of possible companies and products include:

Nike, with an emphasis on running shoes

L'Oral, with a focus on a budget-friendly haircare line

Johnson & Johnson, with a focus on a specific line of personal care products

You are encouraged to select a company and product that you find interesting. To learn about the company, you should visit their website and utilize other public information, such as financial reports. You will need to have a basic familiarity with the company and the product you have selected in order to complete the analysis.

Identifying Geographic Expansion Opportunities Requirements

In this component of the milestone, you will put together a list of ten countries that do not belong to the High Income Economies group, as classified by the World Bank. You may select these countries based on their geographic location - for example, if you decide that you will expand to South America, you may limit your countries to that continent; or you may cast your net wider, if you'd like.

Then, you will locate important data about these countries, including data about their gross domestic product (per capita GDP), level of corruption, and other economic data important to making a decision about the investment.

You will be required to identify data for five variables.

Three of these variables will be predetermined for you. You will need to locate data for your countries in the data sources indicated for these variables.

You will be able to decide on the choices for two out of five variables to be included in your index. These two variables should be related to your choice of the company and the product. For example, if you propose to produce an electric appliance, it may be importance to include Access to Electricity (% of Population) as one of your variables.

You must use reliable data sources. Please refer this list.

You will also be able to determine the weights that you will assign to your variables in creating your ranking of countries.

No variable should be assigned a weight of less than 10%.

You should be able to explain the logic you have used to assign the weights.

Using the provided Country Ranking Analysis Template (below), you will work on ranking of countries. You will work with the top two countries from your list as the candidates for possible investment to perform in-depth research on macroeconomic and microeconomic variables in Milestones 2 and 3, and recommend one of them to the board of directors in Milestone 4.