Smartest Business Moves In History.....

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[quote name='krish' timestamp='1368957607' post='1303771735']
[size=5][color=#FF0000]Story 4:[/color][/size]

[color=#333333]Coca cola came to India and realised that their biggest competition is thumbs up, then owned by parle drinks. Then Coca cola offered a merger with Parle and were turned down. Knowing the scope of the competition, they bought over all the bottling plants that Parle used. Parle didn't have enough money to start their open plant. So now Parle went back to Coke for the merger. They said they weren't interested in a merger and took over thumbs up.[/color]
[/quote]

Ref please....even i tried to search, but failed to get the ref...

[Krish]

[color=#ff0000][size=5]Story 9:[/size][/color]

[color=#333333]One of the most famous and consequential uses of real time knowledge occurred in Europe in 1815. Early in the 19th century information obtainable through communication channels about distant events was painstakingly slow to arrive. Roads were rough, unfinished, really little more than cart paths. There was no wire transmission or speedy organized courier services for delivering messages over vast distances. Word of the outcome of a battle, treaty or an important political affair could takes weeks or months to arrive where the result was most keenly anticipated.[/color]

[color=#333333]The Battle of Waterloo is possibly the most famous military engagement in history. The battle site, the tiny, remote Belgian village of Waterloo, is synonymous today with one's "final act". Waterloo became Napoleon Bonaparte's denouement. His inglorious defeat by the British forces, commanded by the Duke of Wellington, expedited his exile to the tiny island of Elba and the decline of France as a military power for almost a century.[/color]

[color=#333333]Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies had allied to fight with the British against Napoleon. All of these great armies, moving across vast swaths of Europe terrain needed extensive provisioning, arming and logistic support to maintain troops as they girded for the great battle. This was an incredibly expensive enterprise. Massive funding was required to support the campaign.[/color]

[color=#333333][url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family"]The Rothschild banking family[/url] (this is the family which introduced banking system to the world) was already famous across most of Europe for providing a secure funding source for national governments. The Roth[/color][color=#333333]schild's had established five branches of their enterprise. The largest, most important were based in Paris and London. The final Napoleonic war was largely funded by Nathan Rothschild of the family's London branch. This house had provided large sums to both the British and the French. The Rothschild's were famously indifferent to rulers and governments. Nathan Rothschild once famously remarked, "The man who controls the British money supply controls the British, and I control the British money supply". His goal was to profit no matter whom was in power or won a war.[/color]

[color=#333333]Nathan Rothschild knew that early knowledge of the winner at Waterloo, details of the battle, the severity of the loser's defeat would be invaluable in financially manipulating markets to profit from the result. The family had invested heavily over the decades in field agents that forwarded tips and messages, fast packet ships and trained carrier pigeons to speedily deliver notes.[/color]

[color=#333333]The arrival of the carrier pigeons in London with specific battle results from Waterloo provided Rothschild the information he needed to begin to plant rumors. Initially he spread the word that the British had lost. Investors began to adjust their bond and security positions in reaction to this negative news. Rothschild took opposite positions, and then, he strategically released the actual truthful news that Wellington had vanquished Napoleon. This enabled the family to profit on both sides of the trades. It is estimated that the Rothschild family extrapolated an increase in wealth of 20 times their pre-war capital.[/color]

[color=#333333]The foresight to train a winged air force of carrier pigeons proved fortuitous and extremely profitable for the banking house of Rothschild. The edge they enjoyed in receiving real-time information, and spectacularly profiting from the knowledge, became legendary and only increased the perception that they were a family of financial Merlin's. Their power and wealth has multiplied exponentially in the past 200 years. [/color]

[Tatichettu_Tingarodu]

[img]http://media.tumblr.com/8950a48ed4a292eeef24562a79b9be8a/tumblr_inline_mmp9gaZF6C1qz4rgp.gif[/img]

[Krish]

[size=5][color=#FF0000]Story 10:[/color][/size]

[color=#333333]"Back in the 1970s, liquid hand soap was sold by one guy: [/color][color=#333333][url="http://books.google.com/books?id=sU2e-piQ3tUC&pg=PT196&lpg=PT196&dq=Robert+Taylor+Minnetonka+soap&source=bl&ots=OaB0bOGNri&sig=CuHdGoQ5aAVBeTojrtWrPzXfw9w&hl=en&ei=Kz0zTs2eCKfmsQKD7NnkCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Robert%20Taylor%20Minnetonka%20soap&f=false"]Robert Taylor, and his small company Minnetonka[/url][/color][color=#333333]. It was his invention, and he knew he was on to something big. Test audiences loved the product and, despite barely having enough resources to do so, Minnetonka decided to go all in and make a push to take the product nationwide.[/color]
[color=#333333]There was only one problem: Nothing he was selling could be patented. The concept of liquid soap wasn't new, and simple pumps had been around since the dawn of civilization. As a result, Taylor knew several huge soap manufacturers were ready to happily steal his idea the very moment it looked like it could succeed on a large scale. Armed with superior resources and the ability to quickly R&D an imitation product, the industry giants were ready to crush tiny Minnetonka.[/color]
[color=#333333]Taylor, however, was ready for this. Before any other company had the chance, Taylor decided to go shopping one day and bought a few plastic pumps. And by a few we mean *** ALL OF THEM. There were only two companies nationwide manufacturing those little pumps, and Taylor ponied up $12 million -- more than the total net worth of his company at the time -- and ordered [/color][color=#333333][url="http://www.scribd.com/doc/39240526/Judo-Strategy"]100 million of them[/url][/color][color=#333333], effectively buying every single pump these two companies would be able to manufacture for the next year or two.[/color]

[color=#333333][img]http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4074/4915901010_edae8df4d5_z.jpg[/img][/color]

[color=#333333]Anyway, without the part required to dispense the soap, there was nothing the major companies could do but sit and watch Taylor slowly own the entire market. His product would become known as [/color][color=#333333][url="http://www.colgate.com/app/Softsoap/US/EN/Liquid-Hand-Soap/HomePage.cvsp"]SoftSoap[/url][/color][color=#333333], Two years after his little stunt, Colgate-Palmolive would be forced to just buy SoftSoap from Taylor ... for $61 million."[/color]

[Krish]

[size=5][color=#FF0000]Story 11: How Porsche hacked the financial system[/color][/size]

[color=#000000]In 1931, Austro-Hungarian engineer Ferdinand Porsche started a German company in his own name. It offered car design consulting services, and was not a car manufacturer itself until it produced the [/color][url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_64"]Type 64[/url][color=#000000] in 1939. But things got interesting for Porsche long before then.[/color]
[color=#000000]In 1933, he was approached by none other than Adolf Hitler, who commissioned a car designed for the German masses. Porsche accepted, and the result was the iconic Beetle, manufactured under the Volkswagen (lit. “people’s car”) brand. Today, Porsche’s company is one of the world’s premier luxury car brands, while Volkswagen (VW) is itself the world’s third-largest auto maker after General Motors and Toyota.[/color]

[color=#000000]Three years ago, Volkswagen found itself fearing a foreign takeover. Porsche, the company, decided to step in and start buying VW stock ostensibly to protect the landmark brand, widely fueling market expectations that it would eventually buy Volkswagen outright. Of course, this isn’t quite what came to pass.[/color]

[color=#000000]For three years, Porsche kept accumulating VW stock without telling anyone how much it owned. Every time it purchased more, the amount of free-floating VW stock would decrease, driving the stock price up slightly; your basic supply and demand at work. Eventually the share price became high enough that, to outside observers, it wouldn’t have made any sense for Porsche to buy Volkswagen. It would simply have cost too much.[/color]

[color=#000000][img]http://radian.org/notebook/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/porsche_type_64.jpg[/img][/color]

[i][color=#000000]To explain what happened next, I’m going to first tell you about a financial maneuver called shorting.[/color][/i]

At any given point, only a certain amount of a publicly traded company’s stock is floating freely in the market. The rest is held in various portfolios, funds, and investment vehicles. Now, everyone’s familiar with the basic idea behind the stock market: you buy stock when it costs little, and you sell it when it costs a lot, profiting on the difference.
But that assumes a company’s value is going to increase. What if, instead of betting a company will go up, you want to make money betting the company will go down? You can — by selling stock you don’t own.
Say you borrow a certain amount of stock from someone who already owns it. You pay a fixed fee for borrowing the stock, and you sign a contract saying you will return exactly the same amount of stock you took after some amount of time. So, you might borrow a thousand shares of Apple stock from me (I don’t actually own any, but play along), pay me $100 for the privilege, and sign an obligation to return my stock in 3 months. At the time, Apple stock is worth $10 per share.
After you borrow the stock, you immediately sell it. At $10 a share, you get $10,000. Two and a half months later, another rumor about Steve Jobs’ health sends AAPL crashing to only $6 per share for a few hours, so you buy a thousand shares, costing you $6,000. You give me back those shares. Because you successfully bet the company would go down in value, you earned $4,000 minus the borrowing fee. This is called short-selling or shorting the stock, and the downside is obvious: if your bet was wrong, you would have lost money buying back the shares that you have to return to your lender.

[i]Now things get kinky.[/i]
When Volkswagen’s share price exceeded the point where it made sense for Porsche to buy the company, a number of hedge funds realized that Volkswagen shares have nowhere to go but down. With Porsche out of the picture, there was simply no reason for VW to keep going up, and the funds were willing to bet on it. So they shorted huge amounts of VW stock, borrowing it from existing owners and selling it into circulation, waiting for the price drop they considered inevitable.
Porsche anticipated exactly this situation and promptly bought up much of these borrowed VW shares that the funds were selling. Do you see where this is going? Analysts did. According to [i]The Economist[/i], Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley warned clients not to play “billionaire’s poker” against Porsche. Porsche denied any foul play, saying it wasn’t doing anything unusual.
But then, last October 26th, they stepped forward and bared their portfolio: through a combination of stock and options, they owned 75% of Volkswagen, which is almost all the company’s circulating stock. (The remainder is tied up in funds that cannot easily release it.)
To put it mildly, the numbers scared the living hell out of the hedge funds: if they didn’t immediately buy back the Volkswagen stock they were shorting, there [i]might not be[/i] any left to buy later, and it [i]isn’t their stock[/i] — they have to return it to someone. If their only option is thus to buy the VW stock from Porsche, then the miracle of supply and demand will hit again, and Porsche can ask for whatever price it wants per VW share — twenty times their value, a hundred times their value — because there’s no other place to buy. They’re the only game in town.
And that, my friends, is called a short squeeze.

Porsche’s ownership disclosure sent the hedge funds on such a flurry of purchases for any Volkswagen stock still in circulation that the VW share price jumped from below €200 to over €1000 at one point on October 28th, making Volkswagen for a brief time the world’s most valuable company by market cap.
On paper, Porsche made between €30-40 [i]billion[/i] in the affair. Once all is said and done, the actual profit is closer to some €6-12 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Porsche’s revenue for the whole year of 2006 was a bit over €7 billion.
Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was [color=#ff0000]darkly brilliant[/color], a wealth transfer [color=#ff0000]ingeniously conceived[/color] like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune.

PS: Beautifully played...

[Krish]

ltt