发布时间 : 星期二 文章新编剑桥商务英语（高级）第三版2.1更新完毕开始阅读4684920f59eef8c75fbfb3fe
Growing the company Parts of a company
1 Do you think this quotation is true all business?
‘I think that our fundamental belief is that for us growth is a way of life and we have to grow at all times’.
Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries
2 Read this entry from a company website and use these words to label the digram. Subsidiary headquarters sales offices Warehouse R&D division main plan
We are based in La Defense, the business district of Pairs, and new products are developed nearby at our labs in St Dense. Our principal manufacturing facility is just out side Lille and products go from there to be a cental distribution point at Compiegne.Three sales agencies cover the various regions of France with international offices in Frankfurt,Milan and Madrid. The London offices is run by our UK subsidiary.
3 What is the diffidence between the following words and phrases? 1 a sales office and a subsidiary 2 a warehouse and a plant
3 the headquarters and a division Growth Strategy
4 Find a synonym in the box of each of the underlined words.
Go public sell off set up go out of business expand Take over make redundant shut down 1 We acquired Everforce Ltd in 2005.
2 Our target is to grow the business by 15% each year. 3 We created a subsidiary to sell after-sales service.
4 The company will be listed on the Stock Exchange next year. 5 They went bankrupt last year.
6 We laid 300 employees off in June.
7 After a lot of discussion we decided to closed the plant. 8 We have divested our shares in the logistic company.
5 What is the diffidence between the following expressions? 1 Laying people off and firing them
2 taking over a company and merging with it 3 organic growth and non-organic growth
6SAP and Oracle are the world’s leading companies in providing the software solutions for business. But their business strategies are very diffident.
Read the text about SAP’S growth strategy. Choose the best sentences from the list (A-H) below the complete each gap (1-6). Do not use any letter more than once. SAP competes with ‘organic growth’
How do you stay at the top of the heap in the business software game? If you’re SAP, you do it through ‘organic growth’, not blockbuster acquisitions. That is the world from SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. (0) H
The second-best strategy is acquisition: Kagermann said. ‘The best is the organic
growth. We are not just doing the organic growth because we have no other choice.
The comment is aimed squarely at rival Oracle Corp; which spent nearly $20 billion between 2004 and 2006 expanding its core database business into the SAP-dominated business applications market.(1) . ‘We are the market leader,’he said.’It’s on surprise that a distant number-two player wants to catch u.’
SAP was set up in 1972 by five former IBM employees.(2) . Although it has a growing number of subsidiary, there are complements to its main activities, as Shai Agassi, president’s of the company’s Products and technology Group explain, at the same time having a direct dig at Oracle. The key diffidence between the two companies, he says, lies in Oracle’s tendency to ‘acquire an industry solution that is at
the heart’. ‘when we do an acquisition, it’t at the edge of the solutions. (3) Oracle is buying half body parts and trying to make a body out of it.’
In fact, Agassi expects SPA to grow faster than the rest of the industry this year- 15% to 17% in sales of new software licences-through internal innovation and small-scale acquisition.(4) . SAP used to concentrate on large business customers, but increasingly pursuing sales in the market, a strategy that began in 2000. (5) . The company excepts to finish development of the mySAP suite within the next four years, as well as its Enterprise Services Achitecture (ESA). ESA is basically a platform that will allow SAP to provide consistent business services around it, in much the same way as Microsoft has built applications around its successful operating systems.
Among the company’s other goals is the development of hundreds of additional services for the mySAP suite, a so-called ‘ecosystems’ of supportive technologies.
‘Business in the future is not business in an enterprise, ‘Kagermann says.’ It’s business in an ecosystem. (6) . We try to invite others with great ideas to innovate on the platform.’
Exam Success A In fact, it expects sales to companies with fewer than 25,000
make sure that the employees to account for nearly half SAP’s total software
phrase you choose fits sales this year.
grammatically and in B They recently announced they had purchased Virsa System,
meaning, both with a privately held supplier of regulatory compliance software.
the sentence before C You just can’t do everything yourself if you want to remain
and the sentence after. Competitive.
Read the whole text D Competition in the market is fierce and only the big players
back to yourself at will survive.
the end. E Since then, it has evolved from a small, regional
enterprise
into the global market leader in ERP software, employing
more than 34,000 people.
F Kagermann was unimpressed with Oracle’s appetite for big,
Headline-grabbing acquisition ( PeopleSoft Siebel System).
G That is different from buying half of a heart. H He made the comments while he was talking with reporters
Last week during his company’s annual Developer Kickoff
Meeting in Burlingame, CA.
7 Summarise the growth strategies of SAP and Oracle. What is the key to SAP’s longer-term strategy? Past tenses
1 Study these extracts from the text about SAP on page 17.
Name each underline tenses (past simple, past continuous, past perfect, present perfect or used to )
Say what you know about each tense’s use and why you think it is used here. 1 He made the comments while he was talking with reporters last week. 2 SAP was set up in 1972 by fine former IBM employees. 3 Since then, it has evolved from a small, regional enterprise into the global market leader.
4 They recently announced they had purchased Virsa System. 5 SAP used to concentrate on large business customers,but is increasingly pursuing sales in the midmarket. 6 it’s strategy that began in 2000. 2 You receive this internal email. Follow the instruction it. Hi Denise
Below is the short company history I’ve written for the ‘About us’ entry on the English page of the new website. I think it’s generally OK but I’m so unconfident about my use of tenses in English that I’ve just left the verbs in the infinitive! Can you put them in the right form and send it back? Thanks and sorry for being so useless! Brigitte
This is the unusual of Raincoat Software, a company that (1) (come) into being accidentally because of the hobby of one man, Hans Meier.
In 1998 Hans (2) (work) as a computer programmer for a large
bank in Zurich. But he (3) (be) restless. Each evening he (4) (return) home and, just for fun, (5) (hack) into official websites on his personal computer (not the bank’s, of course!). The day after he (6) (hack) onto a particularly sensitive US government website, he (7) (receive) an email from them. Fearing that would the end of his career as a hack at the bank, he (8) (open) it. It (9) (be) a request from the US government, asking if he (10) (want) a job as a security advisor.
Rather than taking a job as a government employee, Hans Meier (11) (see) the opportunity to make a successful business out of a computer security protection. Raincoat Software (12) (be) born.
Since then, the company (13) (employ) over 50 ‘security expert’ - in
other words, people write a similar background to our founder. We (14) (help) over 300 large companies and government departments and are now a $100 million a year business.
But did the US government think it (15) (take) a risk by employing Hans Meier all those years ago? The answer they (16) (give) then is still the company’s motto today:’Better safe than sorry’.
Write about the past
3 write a short piece (100 words approx) about a turning point in your life, work or studies: a moment when you decide to pursue a different route from the one you had up to that point. Use the following to help you. 1 What you were doing before that? 2 What happen to change your life/ 3 What happen next?
4 What happens when companies merge or acquire other companies? look at the table below and make notes.
Opportunities threats Employees Shareholders Customers Suppliers
5 In December 2009 Oracle, the world's second largest business software applications provider, took over PeopleSoft, the third largest. Read the letter that the CEO of PeopleSoft, Dave Duffield, wrote to his employees.
1 Does he think the takeover will benefit employees or not?
2 Which of these adjectives best describes his feelings about the takeover? bitter / resigned/angry
This is a sad day for me, and I'm sure; an equally sad day for you.
It is now clear that Oracle will acquire our company. Over the past few weeks, our independent directors met with individual stockholders to get their views. We were told during these conversations that they believe Oracle's $24 wasn't adequate and did not reflect peopleSoft's real value. It become clear to us that the vast majority of our stockholders would accept $26.50 and Oracle was willing to pay for it.
You should know, and I hope you would expect, that I am deeply saddened by this