This exercise can improve your understanding of various strategies by giving you experience classifying strategies. This skill will help you use the strategy formulation tools presented later. Consider the following sixteen actual year 2011 strategies by various firms.

1. General electric sold its NBC Universal division to Comcast for $6.5 billion.

2. Vision Airlines added more than 40 new cities to its flight destination portfolio.

3. J,C Penney closed many of its stores, outlets call centers & its catalog business.

4. Citigroup sold its EMI group Ltd. Music company.

5. Nestle S.A. acquired CM&D Pharma Ltd. The first move by Nestle to sell foods that target diseases

6. Caterpillar recently acquired Bucyrus International, another mining equipment maker.

7. Limited brands opened its first Victorias Secret in Canada.

8. Wal-Mart opened 40 new supercenters in Canada.

9. The top four advertisers (in order) during Super Bowl XLV were Anheuser-Busch (InBev), PepsiCo, General Motors & Paramount Pictures, each having at least five 30-seconds ads.

10. Grocery store chain Super valu Inc. is closing underperforming stores and laying off employees

11. General Motors entered the entertainment business by producing the Inside the Vault Television series.

12. Caesers entertainment opens its first non-casino hotel in Asia.

13. AOL laid of 20% of its workforce in mid 2011.

14. Wal-Marts 40 new Express stores opened at the cost of $1.2 million each; each stores has pharmacy, grocery section, 75% parking spaces and three-four checkouts.

15. Dell Inc.spent $1 Billion to move away from its PC focus to providing cloud computing services.

16. Siemens sold its Osram lighting unit which had generated $6.6 billion in 2010.

Instructions

Step 1: On a separate sheet of paper numbers from 1 to 16, these numbers correspond to the strategies described

Step 2: What type of strategy best describes the sixteen actions cited? Indicate your answer.

Step 3: Exchange papers with classmate & grade each other papers as your instructor gives the right answer.