TAL company visit questions

Question 1

Nowadays TAL focuses its sales in the US market. Due to the fierce competition and several economic factors like economic growth in BRIC countries and RMB appreciation, would TAL consider changing its sales strategy such as expanding or targeting its business in China to capture more market share in the following years?

Reason for asking

Recently, North America is the major customer target segment of TAL which accounted for 78% of its sales revenue. But because of the economic growth in BRIC countries in the past few years, Chinese consumers were getting affluent and the RMB kept on appreciating against the US dollar (in the past 5 years RMB had appreciated over 20% over $US), we believed China was growing to be the biggest market of consumer products in the future and this could create an business opportunity to TAL to offer apparel in China to satisfy huge customers’ demand.

Question 2

TAL relies heavily on the advanced information systems and the IS involve in most of the TAL’s operations to help TAL gains competitive advantages. However, does TAL have any contingency or substituted plan if the information systems collapse in one day? And does TAL have any manual processes to maintain normal operation if it really happened?

Reason for asking

TAL has started investing in IT infrastructure to support its operation since 1980s. And nowadays, it adopts TradeCard’s suite of web-based financial solution10 to automate its financial transactions, EDI standard for trade document processing with its customers and also ERP system to integrate its business processes. The information system helps TAL a lot to gain competitive advantages. However, a good risk management when implementing of the information systems is also important to reduce the risk of the massive business failure. So we would like to know how TAL reacts to the challenges.

Question 3

 We would like to know if TAL is going to have the RFID tags on its products as multiple RFID tags can be read in the same time. This may help to save the time and cost in the inventory management. If RFID tags are used in the products, how will TAL solve the possible privacy matter that may be encountered?

Reason for asking

RFID is a popular technology nowadays and have been applied by company like Wal-Mart for a better control and tracking of its inventory. We want to know if the technology can also be applied in the apparel industry or in TAL.

Also, as RFID have raised a number of privacy matter when it was implemented by different industries. We would like to know how TAL will do to avoid the privacy measures if they would possibly apply the RFID tags into their products.