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Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO

Harvard Business Review

When I logged into the site for the first time in the spring of 2004, I was prepared to hate the service. By dedicating a small amount of space on every page viewed and allowing companies to display ads, the social networking giant has developed a multi-billion dollar advertising business. display advertisements online.

IPO 13
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4 Strategies for Reaching the Chinese Consumer

Harvard Business Review

Slowing Chinese economic growth coupled with confidence-sapping tumult on the stock market have set alarm bells ringing at companies about their future growth prospects in China. Consumer-facing businesses have an important role to play as the Chinese government nudges its economy from an investment-led to a consumption-led model.

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What U.S. E-Commerce Can Learn from Its Global Copycats

Harvard Business Review

Every new market I look at seems to have an Amazon-style copycat — a website that looks, functions, and sells products a lot like a well-known online retailer. In India there''s Flipkart , in Russia there''s Ozon , and in Thailand, Indonesia, and other South East Asia markets there''s Lazada. In some cases this is true.

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An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal

Harvard Business Review

At the time, though, we were just in search of a new approach to building a sustainable business in that critical but often difficult market. In fact, you could say (and many did) that our previous attempts had failed, in that we hadn’t established a sustained market position. Things hadn’t gone well up until that point.

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The Comprehensive Business Case for Sustainability

Harvard Business Review

Today’s executives are dealing with a complex and unprecedented brew of social, environmental, market, and technological trends. Yet executives are often reluctant to place sustainability core to their company’s business strategy in the mistaken belief that the costs outweigh the benefits.

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How to Pull Your Company Out of a Tailspin

Harvard Business Review

Free fall is a crisis of obsolescence and decline that can happen at any point in a company’s life cycle, but most often it affects maturing incumbents whose business model has come under competitive attack from insurgents or is no longer viable in a changing market. By 1993 the company had $1.3 billion in revenue.

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The Secrets to TripAdvisor's Impressive Scale

Harvard Business Review

As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking "lean startups" from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. billion market capitalization as of this writing. Scaling Lesson 1: Focus On Finding A Great Business Model.

EBITDA 8