My Bloomberg Experience

On the Wednesday 24 November 2010, our class went on visit to Bloomberg headquarter in London. The atmosphere was very friendly. It was made possible for me to invite four of my friends, who were allowed to join the class for the visit. 

There are three major parts in which I was very interested.

Bloomberg TV

We had the opportunity to see a journalist, who was presenting a show on Bloomberg TV. We could see the TV set, teleprompter, journalist and camera. It was very interesting to see this journalist in action. I already watched Bloomberg TV, but I think I am more interested now because of being able to see behind the scenes of this TV show. 

We have seen this TV set during our Bloomberg visit

Source : http://weblogs.jomc.unc.edu/talkingbiznews/?p=11517

Demonstration of Bloomberg Terminal

I already went to the Bloomberg terminal at the Regents College, but I learnt more with this demonstration. With the terminal, we had access to so many options like real time evolution of stock, last news related to the company, analysis from independent financial analyst or calculation of advanced financial formula, etc.

The host made fun of the ‘Dine’ function, which helps employees and clients to find a good restaurant, with feedbacks to read about it. 

The last thing was new services offered by Bloomberg, which integrated satellite map, it was possible to see in real time, the evolution of the oil spill (BP) or to see where a boat shipment is.

This chart was made by Bloomberg and I used it for my course on Risk Financial Management

Source : Bloomberg Terminal at the Regents College

General information about the company

I liked the general presentation about Bloomberg and the visit of the different floors. It was interesting to see that each floor was dedicated to a specific department, with specific colours, which are suppose stimulate employees. Moreover, Bloomberg uses a lot of recycled material and they own one of the largest company’s private aquarium. I learnt about the history of the company and work opportunities at Bloomberg. I do not want to work for Bloomberg because I am more interested in Bank or a hedge fund, however, I will certainly use Bloomberg Terminal for my future work.

Our visit ended at the Bloomberg’s cafeteria to have coffee and fruits. Bloomberg employees are treated by their employer, which offers them coffee, hot chocolate, fruits, chips and cereal bars for free at the cafeteria. The disadvantage of this cafeteria is that there is no place to sit, what I think is intentional, because board directions do not want their employees to have too long breaks. 

It was a good experience for my friends and I and I will surely watch more news on Bloomberg TV.

Business school and Universities had to adapt their method to the new generation of students

Students aged between 15 and 30 are in the Y generation or the Millennial Generation. They grew up immersed in new technologies. Instant messaging, watching videos, reading the news, listening to music or social networks like Facebook or Twitter are all the things they do on a daily basis, with an internet connexion. When new evolution of technology emerges like smartphones and Tablets, they know how to use it easily and regularly. This new generation wants to use multimedia at school. Now, it is a very difficult challenge for each teacher to grab the attention of students with only lectures and case study. They demand that higher education changes its lecturing styles, making use of new technologies.

Business schools have already evolved by equipping classrooms with material that enables to make a PowerPoint Presentation, show videos or websites but they do not use multimedia enough. There are some business schools that try new method to make a full use of media material, like Bason and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business that are experimenting video conferencing system that enables to invite a guest speaker, who would be on different location in the world or use this technology to enable discussion with off-campus student.

The video conference looks like that

Source : http://computers-plus.us/hardware-lab/duke-university-extends-global-learning-with-cisco-telepresence-lecture-hall

Another example is Tom Smith, Assistant Professor of Finance at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business, who asked students to take their laptop for his course on macroeconomics. Students were asked to download official government data from the web, drawing a graph and make some basic calculation, which would help them understand better the lecture, while attending it.

A last example is Professor Carboni, who uses often videos in his lectures on organisational behaviour. In a lesson on leadership style, he provides students with examples as a half time speech of a basketball coach Bobby Knight found on Youtube, which would be similar to this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7KijRfU-c/ .

Professors could use the technology just for entertainment purposes and not only to improve the learning experience, therefore business schools have to be careful about how to use new technology.

In my opinion, universities and business schools should make more often use of new technology. The challenge will be to have a good balance of the various ways of lecturing. If two-hour lecture made of theory provided by the lecturer, would be liven up video that relates to the subject and provides examples or illustrates a point, if a debate was made in the class room, a guest speaker invited for a case study would through data, help improvement and to me, this would be an ideal lecture, helping enriching my experience.

Primark : Are they interested in profit ?

Primark is a British retailer company which sells all kind of clothes. The company offers very cheap clothes of an acceptable quality. Some persons think that this company offers the best value for money. I went once in this store in London, it was the most crowded shop I had ever entered in. I did not buy anything, but I noticed that Primark offers some interestingly cheap prices, like big towels for £3. I asked myself one question: How could they do some profits? I think they make profit with the quantity of sales, low margin and poorly paid staff. In the store, I saw only cashiers, who were overflowed, clothes were scattered in the store and no one seemed concerned about the storage of goods.

Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Thus, I imagine that they make low profit on each sold product, but they are interested in profit because the company has opened seven new stores in Britain.

So I did not understand the news that I read on Google news, saying that Primark will have an increase of its taxes linked to a huge increase in the price of cotton; which has doubled, letting Primak chose between two possibilities:

1) Take the same margin and higher their prices

2) Keep the same prices and absorb higher costs within the margin

They choose the second option, which will have an effect on the profit the company makes. I do not really understand this strategy because I do not know the concurrence of Primark, within the cheap clothes market. Nevertheless, to me, all people who are interested in Primark because of the low price are satisfied. If Primark amplifies this advantage against concurrence, I don’t think they will have more customers because the majority of customers in clothes market are not looking only at the price. So I am very confused about Primark strategy. If someone has an opinion in this subject, he is welcome to share it with me.