Preview

Borders Group Inc. Case Study

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
2797 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Borders Group Inc. Case Study
Borders Group Inc.

Professor: Simon Dekker
Student: Yanhui Zheng
Student ID: 021244231
Date: 02- -2010

Introduction
Borders Group Inc. is one of leading and well-known retailers of books, CD, and other educational items. Its idea is “To create richer, more satisfying lives through knowledge and entertainment.” In order to accomplish its mission, Borders provide additional services to make its customer enjoy spending in the store. Borders’ store is not just a bookstore that people go in, buy books, and leave. More likely, it is a place that people can relax and learn knowledge at the same time. Despite the stores throughout nationwide, Borders also has stores in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Oman, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates, and in total approximate 600 stores. Its headquarter is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Borders Group Inc.’s history can be traced by two brands: Borders and Waldenbooks.
Lawernce Hoyt ran a rent library in 1933. Later in 1962, Hoyt opened first independent bookstore named Walden Book Store. In 1971, an 800-square-foot used bookstore named Borders Book shop was opened. In 1984, Waldenbooks was purchased by Kmart Corporation, and in 1992 Kmart Corporation also merged Borders and named them as Borders-Walden Group. Three years later, it was renamed as Borders Group Inc., and moved headquarter to Ann Arbor.
Recent years, Borders can not compete with online sellers, especially Amazon.com. It starts to lose business, and has to close stores in order to cut its expenses. Now, it is close to bankruptcy, and is preparing the files.
As-is Condition
According to Moneycentral.com, from 2001 to 2006, Border Group Inc. made approximate 100 million dollars every year. Later it started to lose money. In year 2009 and 2010, it boomingly lost 184.7 and 110.2 million dollars. Borders as a leading traditional bookstore, its experience is a live example that shows the industry life cycle for the tradition bookstore industry. Following char



References: About Us. (2010). Borders.com. Retrieved on Feb. 21, 2010 from http://www.borders.com/online/store/BGIView_bgiabouthistory Amazon.com, Inc. (2011). Finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved on Feb 21, 2010, from http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMZN&ql=1. Amazon.com, Inc. (2011). Money. msn.com. Retrieved on Feb 21, 2010, from http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/stock-price?Symbol=AMZN Brohan, M. (2010). Borders jumps into the e-books fray with a new online bookstore. Internetretailer.com. Retrieved on Feb. 21, 2010 from http://www.internetretailer.com/2010/08/01/borders-jumps-e-books-fray-new-online-bookstore Weinman, S. (2010). Amazon 's E-Book Market Share May Plummet: Great News for Amazon. Dailyfinance.com. Retrieved on Feb. 21, 2010, from http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/amazons-e-book-market-share-may-plummet-great-news-for-amazon/19361847/

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Christianbook.com is the online sales distributor of Christian Book Distributors. This is a company that originated several years prior to the implementation of the Internet. The company was started by two brothers who were 19 and 14 years of age. They started this company from their parents' home in Lynn, Massachusetts. After the two brothers graduated, they were able to relocate the business from their home to its first facility in Peabody, Massachusetts.…

    • 1350 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Kawamoto, D. (2009, March 6). Barnes & Noble acquire e-book seller. cnet. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10190554-93.html…

    • 1185 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    MGMT 434 Outline

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Borders was once the largest book retailer, but when web based retailing started to trend they had to declare bankruptcy…

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Best Essays

    The recent liquidation of Borders, a previously successful book-selling company has revealed the industry may be a dying breed. Half-Price Books has demonstrated throughout the expansion of their business the ability to continue growth and keep customers coming back to their company. One of the reasons Borders found themselves in trouble was because of their slow transition into e-readers and online book sales. In order for Half-Price Books to grow with the market and remain competitive they need to incorporate online sales into their business objectives. This allows customers to locate books they are interested in and provides the capability to purchase online. The implementation of user reviews would launch the site into the same arena as Amazon.com and allow them to be even more successful. Half-Price Books inventory is 50% from used…

    • 2413 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Barnes and Noble, which is America’s largest retail bookseller, is losing its pace in the book business. Its market share is declining from past couple of years with huge amount of lose. Majority of its business and marketing efforts are falling short to recover its constantly slowing down pace.…

    • 160 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    References: Amazon.com, Inc. (2014, october 10). Financial and Strategic Analysis Review. Retrieved from Amazon.com, Inc: http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?banner=4f874577&digest=4f8c317c2ce3be6a85eb173efa90ff7c&contentSet=SWOT&recordID=360812_GDRT27249FSA…

    • 1349 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    With competition on the rise, the retail book industry has gone through numerous changes over the years, creating few opportunities and more threats. New developments in technology in the past decade and more businesses expanding their product offering have created intense rivalry between on-line based organizations and storefront organizations. “Intense rivalry among established companies constitutes a strong threat to profitability.” (Hill & Jones, 2010). Organizations such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble not only compete with each other, but also must fight to gain market share over retail stores such as Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.…

    • 1656 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Barnes & Noble is a company that was founded and owned by actual booksellers. To this date, they are the nation 's largest bookseller and employ more than 50,000 booksellers in the 800 stores around the nation. Leonard Riggio is the founder and chairman with a vision that bookstores could be the place where people could be and become (www.barnesandnoble.com). In this paper I will look at Barnes & Noble 's vision, goals and objectives as well as their strategic plan and will give a SWOT analysis of the company.…

    • 429 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Beginning in 1994, the widely popular Amazon was just a small, unknown online bookstore. Although you wouldn’t have known it back then, but Amazon soon became the business model for online retailing (Kroenke 29). But books weren’t…

    • 1735 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Barnes and Noble is a Fortune 500 company and is the leader in the bookselling arena operating 1,341 storefronts, 636 operations on college campuses servicing over 4.6 million students and faculty, and operates one of the largest ecommerce sites on the World Wide Web. Barnes and Noble employs over 35,000 full and part time employees across the United States (www.barnesandnoble.com, 2011). Barnes and Noble and Microsoft joined strategically to develop the digital platform known as NOOK, a digital book providing customers a multitude of books, magazines, newspapers, and other content via downloads from the Barnes and Noble site. Barnes and Noble provides the customer base with over 6,000 publications of various materials…

    • 2174 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mcom 100

    • 345 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Independent bookstores are closing, leaving only "super bookstores" such as Barnes & Noble and Borders to sell the nations reading material. Although these stores have newer and a wider variety of reading material, reality is that these "super bookstores", are not too far from closing the doors themselves. The rise of digital technology is redefining the "Art of Reading".…

    • 345 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Barnes & Noble is a key player in the Book Retail Industry. This mature industry has been experiencing slow growth over the last several years, much slower than overall retail sales. Barriers to entry into this industry are quite high, and suppliers have modest influence over booksellers. The introduction of the Internet has brought about many changes to this industry. It has increased rivalry, buyer power, and substitutes. Spending time "surfing the net" is one of many substitutes to reading books nowadays. Other technological advances, such as VCR 's and video games, have replaced time otherwise spent reading. Buyers have greater influence over the industry, because they have more buying options and faster price comparison ability.…

    • 6747 Words
    • 27 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Better World Books (BWB) was founded in 2002 as a B corporation, meaning it targets successful performance in three fundamental areas: financial, social, and environmental endeavors. BWB has grown successfully since its creation as a small, socially motivated firm to one of the larger, more successful corporations of its kind. Despite the impressive and inspiring performance and growth through creative expansions, BWB acknowledges the changing conditions of the used book marketplace and is pleased to outline a brief review of current strategy and recommendations for supporting operations moving forward.…

    • 3147 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Best Essays

    White, B. (2009, August 25). Amazon, Microsoft, & Yahoo! All fight Google over potential book sales. [Blog]. Retrieved February 9, 2010 from http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/08/25/amazon-microsoft-and-yahoo-all-fight-google-over-potential-boo/…

    • 1850 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Better Essays

    The future of Barnes & Noble booksellers is questionable. They are facing several pressing issues that must be dealt with delicately and efficiently. As highlighted in the first paper, a major problem for Barnes & Noble is their declining profits caused by decreasing sales of physical books and printed information. Another issue affecting the success of their future is the lack of organization and ability to make decisions of the top management.…

    • 989 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays