Kraft on 2010

PART 2 - Information gathering and accounting / business techniques - 1,500

Words:

The first and most important source of information about Kraft Foods must be come from the corporate website where we can find the general info about company as a whole in part " About us". It listed out initial view about management team, the highlight of corporate achievement to what company has been stand for. We also can find out about the bands which are currently owned by Kraft Foods in the brands sections, or company social responsibility, corporate governance in responsibility. And investor centre will provide us all the information which is necessary for prospective investors such as annual reports, SEC filing. But this source of information has been considered as lack of independence due to mainly coming from the corporate, that is what company wants to show for investors, available to display. To make sure those information is reliable, all the financial statements need to be audited, any big events such as acquisition of new brands or companies or divestiture need to be compared with some business and financial news website such as BBC Business, Financial Times, Bloomberg. This is the source that giving me the initial ideas about doing research and report on Kraft. Also, as my report mainly use PESTEL to analyse the macro environment which had not been clearly stated in the annual reports as well as corporate website in term of quality and details of information.

The next source which I have thought about is the public access libraries such as British Library. British Library is one of the most comprehensive public library for any researchers with more than 10, 000 pages in the main website, 30,000 images from online gallery, 14 mil items in catalogue records, and more than 9 ms articles from 20,000 journals. In this library, I have found "Confectionary Industry Guide" updated on 5th Jan 2011 which listed the report about Ten Top Confectionary Companies, Future directions in confectionery, growth opportunities in confectionery and plenty more by Business Insight. It provides the brief on global confectionary market and analysis on those companies in term of finance, global strategy and SWOT and a lot more insight industry knowledge which had been researched and summarised for the complete report. However, as the requirement by copyright regulation, it is only available onsite by visiting the library. Therefore, it has been difficult for me to start my work at home but coming to British library. Besides, some resources has been not available on site and I have ordered it few days in advance, that made my time budget shorter as I had decided to do the Oxford Brookes dissertation pretty late compare to others.

Also there are plenty of reference books for the accounting and business techniques and models which I have applied to this report can be found on the reading section of London School of Economics, one of the biggest public research universities with vast resource on social science. But once again, due to the late decision on starting the Oxford Brookes dissertation, my time resource had been restricted up to 18 of April when LSE students start their exam period, and the visitors can not have the access to the resource.

Besides those secondary sources of information, I had tried to obtain from the primary source but lack of personal contact with either Kraft staff or Cadbury, the part of Kraft since 2010.

also conducted the research for primary information. The research had been conducted under the forms of interview face to face on the supermarket's store, questionnaires to the sample of ten customers and total of ten hours observation in the supermarket stores to see. Also, the limit resources had stopped me from conduct any interview or questionnaire regarding the working environment or the implementing the strategies of companies. Efforts has been used to search for connection through social networks such as Facebook but still no reply

The problems have arisen when my research was so lack of deep source of data which can be supportive for the model I have chosen. Coming to British library and had access to the rich database of business insight had made me became overwhelmingly with all the deep report of food and confectionery industry. It was so stressful in choosing data, taking the right information and analysing it to get the suitable idea for my report. And I have printed a lot of documents down from the electronic resources of British library, noted it up so I can organise my mind with the load of information for my report. Accounting/ business techniques with their limitations

In order to understand Kraft, firstly I would like to employ few main accounting ratios which can be used to analyse and interpret their financial statement in the period of three years from 2008, 2009 up to 2010. Those ratios can be used to evaluate the financial health of corporate activities but also have few potential limitations when applying. They help to compare the result of business with different companies in the same or different industries. Every business has different scale of operation; means will be different in the result numbers. By using the ratio, we can see the picture of business is clearer. Those ratios can be grouped into five categories:

Profitability: provides the evidence of achievement of business's