REVENUE STRATEGY - HONDA

1. Honda will launch a hybrid-only model in 2009:
It will produce 200,000 of the new hybrids per year in Japan
It will sell them initially in North America, Europe and Japan.
It will offer the cars at a "more affordable price level" than currently available.
2. It will launch its first-ever hybrid sports car, based on the CR-Z concept car.
3. It will continue to look to fuel cell technology.
4. It will also begin leasing a small number of its FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in Southern California for $600 a month.
5. It will introduce its new, clean, diesel engine technology into the U.S. in 2009
6. It is expanding capacity:
It is opening a new factory in Indiana in the US next fall.
It doubled capacity at its plant in Bangalore, India, to 100,000 this year and has begun building a second auto plant, which will be operational from 2009.
It will begin production at another new plant in Thailand in the second half of next year.
It is adding capacity at its Brazilian plant
It began construction of new factory in Argentina last month.
7. It does not have high expectations for plug-in hybrids, which can be charged overnight using a home electricity supply.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - CHINA MOBILE

China Mobile Ltd. gained 6.5 million customers last month by scrapping charges for incoming calls and expanding in smaller towns and villages, where fewer people have mobile phones.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - BLUESCOPE STEEL

1. BlueScope Steel Ltd., Australia's largest steelmaker, agreed to buy four U.S. building material businesses for $730 million, betting commercial construction demand will defy a worsening homebuilding slump.
The acquisition will double BlueScope's sales in the U.S. commercial and industrial building market, adding 23 plants from California to North Carolina.
2. It will fund the acquisition with a 364-day loan.
3. It will study further acquisitions in the North American building products market.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - GENENTECH

1. Genentech espouses a radical set of management principles: Stay focused on the science. Tune out Wall Street's insistence on short-term profits. And leap at new drug opportunities "that other people think stink."
2. It had once increased research spending to 50% of the company's sales—more than twice what most drug companies spend on R&D resulting in a stream of hit drugs pushing sales up from $1 billion to $9 billion since 1999
3. It is taking on one of the most treacherous areas of medicine - diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and more than 80 other ailments that arise when the immune system becomes deranged, attacking the very tissues and organs it's supposed to protect.
4. It took insights of British physician Jonathan Edwards on its cancer drug Rituxan, that the drug's method of annihilating cancer-causing cells might also ease the agony of rheumatoid arthritis.
5. Its scientists rethought everything they knew about how the body's defense mechanisms go astray.
6. It launched a program to study the drug as a possible treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, MS, and lupus.
7. It deployed a third of its 1,000 researchers to pursue new drugs to fight autoimmune disease.
8. Its scientific journey has been guided by executives who more closely resemble the staff of an academic medical center.
9. It tries to hire scientists who could win the Nobel Prize not just someone who will do a good job.
10. Its CEO gets deeply involved in research even when it isn't anywhere close to yielding marketable products.
11. It has redesigned its Rituxan trials, building in extra patient checkups in hopes that physicians would spot dangerous side effects fast. It carefully tracks patients after they leave clinical trials.
12. It is looking for clues that will help "personalize" new drugs to groups of patients that are most likely to respond
13. It hired five autoimmune specialists from a single lab at the University of Minnesota to better match patients with drugs, 14. It is working on some completely new approaches to autoimmune disease considering ideas others might overlook.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - GENERAL MOTORS

1. General Motors Corp., the world's largest automaker, plans to invest as much as $5 billion in China over the next five years to expand its share of the world's fastest-growing major car market.
2. It will spend about $1 billion a year on car and engine development, production facilities, technical and after-sales support and infrastructure.
3. It is investing $250 million to build a research laboratory in China
4. It relies on Asia and Latin America for profit in contrast to its home market, where it is closing factories and cutting jobs. It is cutting first-quarter North American production 11 percent after its U.S. sales dropped by the same rate in November. It will sell more than 1 million Cadillacs, Buicks, and other models in China in 2008, a more than 150-fold increase in sales over a decade.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB

1. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. will focus on developing new drugs for cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
2. Its restructuring effort will allow the company to focus resources on developing new drugs and buying products and companies that can add to its lineup of experimental treatments
3. It reduced its sales force in 2002 to focus on specialist doctors instead of primary-care physicians as its drug portfolio changed.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - HEWLETT PACKARD

1. Hewlett-Packard, the biggest personal-computer maker, launched Innovation Program Office in 2006 to help buy hip, nimble startups for its huge Personal Systems Group and inject big doses of the small companies' creative juices directly into the HP culture. Startups are even providing HP with a new customer-based system that accelerates product development in other divisions.
2. It has learned how to (a) develop cool, high-margin products that appeal to new consumer groups such as video-game fanatics; (b) use social media to conduct Web-based consumer research; and (c) inspire engineers in HP Laboratories to turn concepts into products faster.
3. Its businesses (computers, printers and imaging machines, storage devices and servers, and info tech service) have shifted their focus from developing cool technologies to making products customers want.
4. It is trying to market personal computers today as being friendly, not just fast and powerful.
5. It is not just selling fast printers, but pitching terrific printing experiences.
6. It has developed the HP Blackbird 002 personal computer as the first fruit of acquiring Voodoo, a fan-based, gamer-driven PC company. The Blackbird is so user-friendly that consumers who want to customize it themselves can do so without using tools. It takes 10 seconds to replace or upgrade a hard drive. It's powerful and fast with room for five hard drives to accommodate rich graphics.
7. Its Snapfish Labs has boosted the rate of customer-focused innovation because consumers can weigh in early on potential HP products.
8. Its acquisition of Tabblo, acquired in 2007 suddenly injected a Web culture it never had before. Tabblo signed the contract and released its Flickr service in only six weeks—vs. an expected three to four months.
9. Its new strategy is innovation via absorption—infusing the acquirer's culture with the target's culture. It isn't business process re-engineering. This is a fundamental shift in the culture of an organization.

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10. It has leaned on a network of more than 100,000 retailers to help sell PCs, particularly the notebook models favored by consumers.
11. It has spent more than $6.5 billion on six acquisitions to bolster returns in software and turn a money-losing unit two years ago into HP's fastest-growing business.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - CHINA MOBILE

1. China Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest wireless-phone carrier by users, added record subscribers (about 6.6 million) in October by cutting prices and expanding in smaller towns and villages, where fewer people have phone services.
2. In February it started a caller-pays billing system, which doesn't charge users who receive calls.

[China will accelerate the process of granting licenses for providing third-generation mobile-phone services to fixed-line operators to help them compete in the nation's telecommunications market]

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REVENUE STRATEGY - GERDAU

1. Gerdau SA, the largest Brazilian steelmaker, agreed to acquire Quanex Corp.'s vehicular metals unit which makes special bar quality, or SBQ, steel used to make axels and other critical parts of cars, trucks and other vehicles, to secure North American production of steel used in automobile parts and consolidate Gerdau as a global supplier and open new possibilities for growth in the global market.
2. It will pay $1.67 billion at $39.20 a share in cash for the unit after the spinoff of the company's building-products division exceeding the Nov. 16 closing price of $36.74 for Houston-based Quanex.
3. It will expand outside Brazil and target higher-value specialty products. It is expanding operations in the Americas, Asia and Europe to reduce costs and gain leverage with suppliers of scrap metal and energy.
4. It agreed to buy a 49 percent stake in the owner of Mexico's Aceros Corsa SA
5. Its Ameristeel unit in the U.S. acquired Midlothian, Texas-based Chaparrel Steel Co. for $4.22 billion.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - TRAVELODGE

1. Travelodge, the budget hotel chain plans to expand its presence in Spain after a pilot scheme. Spanish consumers' appetite for budget products - and rising internet usage - made it confident the move would be a success.
2. It would open about 100 hotels by 2020 in its £700m programme - initially targeting Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia.
3. It will open about 40 new hotels each year in the UK until 2020 - concentrating its programme in the Greater London area, as well as Wales and Scotland.

[Click here for full story at: BBCNEWS.COM]

REVENUE STRATEGY - STOCKPICKR.COM

1. Stockpickr.com website processes information from Securities & Exchange Commission filings and provides ready-made investment signals that are proven to work
2. It is free; it makes money from advertising.
3. It attracts traffic by allowing investors to view the portfolios and latest publicly available moves of hundreds of successful pros, including Warren Buffett, hedge fund great George Soros, or mutual fund manager and Yale professor Martin Whitman.
4. Its visitors also form a virtual community whose members interact with each other, answering one another's questions and sharing knowledge about various strategies.
5. One of the site's most popular features is a function to compare ordinary investors' picks with those of the pros.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - GOOGLE

1. Google the Internet search and advertising company will bid alone at January's auction of wireless airwaves, but it's likely to need a partner to develop a network
[The auction, scheduled for January, gives participants a rare opportunity to assemble spectrum for a national network in a single swoop, potentially creating a competitor to existing mobile service providers AT&T and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone.]
2. It appeared ready to commit at least $4.6 billion to bidding for spectrum.
3. It owns large quantities of the fiber-optic cables necessary for carrying wireless calls over long distances but may also need to rely on national carriers such as AT&T and Verizon
4. It has made strides in the area of mobile software.
5. Google and 33 other companies including Motorola (MOT) and LG Electronics announced the Open Handset Alliance and a new cell-phone-software platform named Android that's designed to make it cheaper and easier to create mobile applications and services.
6. It has hired Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, with years of experience in phone design.
7. It maintains its own local wireless network at the site of its Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters
8. It isn't ruling out partnering to build a network, which has to be carried out quickly

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REVENUE STRATEGY - GAP

1. Retailer Gap is building up its goodwill, which is likely to help its revenue in the long run.
2. It has pledged to do more to eradicate child labour after it emerged one of its Indian suppliers had been employing children as young as 10.
3. It will donate $200,000 to improve factory conditions in India as well as tighten up its own procedures.
4. It withdrew an order from sale after it was sub-contracted to a firm, which used children to embroider the product. The children involved will be paid until they reach working age, and then offered jobs.
5. It has suspended half its orders from its original contractor and put the firm on "probation" for the next six months.

[Click here for full story at: BBCNEWS.COM]

REVENUE STRATEGY - ANN TAYLOR STORES

1. AnnTaylor Stores Corp., the clothing retailer geared toward women 25 to 55, helped revenue by new stores, Web sales and purchases at factory stores. The retailer operates 921 stores.
2. It is adding bath products and a line of luxury apparel to its Ann Taylor chain
3. It is adding more printed, lightweight sweaters at Loft, its biggest chain, to draw in holiday shoppers as consumers rein in spending on clothes.
4. It plans to open a chain in the second half of 2008 targeting women in their 40s and 50s.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - STARBUCKS

1. Starbucks will blanket the nation with TV commercials touting its holiday beverage and gift lines
2. It has reshuffled some executives
3. It was able to report a 4% increase in same-store sales with
a) two price increases and
b) the expansion of hot breakfast offerings to more locations.

[It is under a massive assault from McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and seemingly every other retailer with a brew pot in the back.]

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REVENUE STRATEGY - WOOLWORTHS

1. Woolworths Ltd., Australia's biggest retailer, is appealing a decision by New Zealand's antitrust regulator to block it from buying Warehouse Group Ltd., that country's biggest general merchandise retailer. Woolworths already owns New Zealand's second-largest supermarket chain
2. It plans a 40 percent reduction in annual carbon dioxide emissions and impact on the environment by 2015 from a current level of 3.7 million metric tons by
a) changing the company's car fleet to more efficient vehicles,
b) working with transport suppliers to lower emissions and
c) cutting annual water usage by 200 million liters within three years.
(less pollution = more goodwill = more revenue)

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REVENUE STRATEGY - ORACLE

1. Oracle, one of the world's largest technology companies, has pledged to deliver Fusion a half-year early—in the first part of 2008. Fusion aims to
a) Knit together the best parts of Oracle's homegrown software and the array of products amassed through its acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and dozens of other companies and
b) Close ground on archrival SAP in the market for the software companies use to plan budgets, manage payrolls, and track customers.
2. It introduced a virtualization software product, dubbed Oracle VM that will help companies make more efficient use of their servers like the software from industry highflier VMware.
3. Its tight rein on expenses and strength in the flush energy sector could immunize it from the ills that have afflicted companies more closely tied to the beleaguered financial and automotive industries. 4. It benefits from the quarterly maintenance fees customers pay to keep up their software.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - QUALCOMM

1. Qualcomm, one of the leading makers of chips that run cell phones, has been expanding into a range of other wireless technologies to move beyond its reliance on chips based on so-called Code Division Multiple-Access technology at a time when two of the biggest CDMA players, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, are considering technologies that could lessen their demand for CDMA
2. It purchased Firethorn, a provider of mobile banking services and the proposed secure contactless payments system by waving a mobile phone past a scanner, for $210 million because of the growing number of people using cell phones to carry out financial transactions.
3. It had created Brew, a software platform that developers can use to build mobile applications such as games,
4. It has made various software purchases, including Trigenix, a maker of cell phone menus.
5. It has joined the Open Handset Alliance, an effort by Google to create a package of wireless applications and services. 6. It was also one of the creators of the Skypephone, a mobile device running Skype's Web-calling service.

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REVENUE STRATEGY - SHINSEI BANK

1. Shinsei Bank Ltd. plans to team up with Indian billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala to sell mutual funds in the world's second-fastest growing major economy starting operations early next year.
2. Joining forces with Jhunjhunwala would give Shinsei faster access to an industry where mutual fund assets almost doubled to $142 billion in the 12 months through October.
3. Shinsei will own 75 percent of the business and Jhunjhunwala will hold 15 percent, they said. The remainder will be owned by employees.
[The Tokyo-based banks are turning to other Asian markets for growth as profits plunge.]

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REVENUE STRATEGY - WONSON INTERNATIONAL

1. Wonson International Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong metals and securities trader, will diversify and buy the Jiangxi Jiangzhou Chinese shipyard for HK$3.5 billion ($449 million), aiming to broaden its revenue base by capitalizing on rising Asian demand for vessels.
2. It will compete with shipyard rivals in South Korea and Japan by
a) expanding its capacity to 250,000 tons by 2010,
b) improving its manufacturing processes and
c) maintaining low costs

[Demand for vessels is rising because of rapid economic development in Asian nations such as China and India]

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