Posted: April 15th, 2015

Assignment 2 requires you to develop a COUNTRY PROFILE (or scenario) of Turkey for Neon Cosmetics, which is interested in exploring opportunities in that country.

Assignment 2 requires you to develop a COUNTRY PROFILE (or scenario) of Turkey for Neon Cosmetics, which is interested in exploring opportunities in that country.

This assignment requires you to imagine you are an individual, international business consultants, working at Neon Cosmetics who have been asked to advise on taking that company into Turkey. You must try and get into their shoes and look at the business environment of Turkey through their requirements, their company and their industry.

Assignment 2 is purely a country profile. We want to know about the current Turkish environment and whether it would be a suitable environment to set up a new part of the business. We don’t only want to know for the next 3 months but we need you to think about the next 3 to 4 years. It is unlikely that you can really set up a business under a year so you would need to have some knowledge of what is likely to happen over the next few years. You are required to briefly forecast what the Turkish environment will be like in 2019.

This assignment is PRACTICAL and requires you to identify the criteria you should consider under the factors (financial, political, economic etc…) Next you must collect the relevant data, in other words the facts and figures. As consultants you would want to advise your company about the environment and whether there are any major problems, e.g. the economy overheating (inflation rates), economic growth rates, legislation preventing foreign ownership of land or operations, major corruption which is almost impossible to overcome, and so on. You have to take material from Topics 1-6 which relate to the situation of Neon Cosmetics. The idea in this Assignment is to get you to apply what you are learning in the subject to this case study.

We require you to be succinct, in line with business writing, but it doesn’t prevent you from having appendices which provide all the relevant data you have found. While you must include all critical material for your particular business in the report, you can place other important information in the appendices. You need to refer to your appendices in the text, and they need to be numbered accordingly, i.e. Appendix 1, Appendix 2 etc.

We expect that from your data you will be able to form some kind of an opinion on whether or not Turkey is suitable for your company to enter as a new market. If it is not worth entering at the moment, is it worth considering over the next 4 years? We require accurate, timely and relevant data. In addition, we will assess you on your reasoning as to suitability of Turkey as a country for entry, for example factors such as economic growth, the cost of labour, the infrastructure, the political environment, government’s rules around foreign investment and whether there are any government incentives for foreign direct investment.

As we have explained, you don’t take your business off shore for only 6 months you usually want many successful years. We don’t expect you to be able to predict what the future holds. But we do expect you to look politically at the country and say, for example, whether there is going to be an election and what are the most likely scenarios, or economically what is likely to happen over the next few years. You are evaluating the business risks and trying to position your business. We will reward you in this section for using the data and making educated predictions, which are supported with logical explanations.

So what we are asking you to do is to imagine you – as in Assignment 1 – are advisors to the Managing Director and the senior management team of Neon Cosmetics and look at Turkey through their eyes. Therefore when looking at different items, for example business setup in Turkey, it needs to be from the perspective of Neon Cosmetics, and a cosmetics company.

Please do not give us an account of what Neon Cosmetics should do or identify the models you could use for entry into the Turkish market. These come in Assignment 3. This assignment requires you to find the facts and figures and prepare a country profile of Turkey for Neon Cosmetics. It is about Turkey, not about Neon Cosmetics.

The collection and analysis of this information and data is the first step to enable you to make the recommendations for action in Assignment 3 (which will include strategy, structure, entry modes and so on).

Revised February 2015