Hard Choices: Best Buy and Five Star in China (A)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the huge size and growth potential of the Chinese market, no multinational corporations can afford to neglect it. Nonetheless, Chinese culture, consumer behavior, and competitors are quite different from those in the West. Adaption and localization are necessary steps for many multinational corporations to survive in China. The leading global consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy, opened its own-branded stores in China in 2006 and adopted a U.S.-style operating model. However, Best Buy–branded stores could not break even in China, and Best Buy had to close all of them at the beginning of 2011. Case A analyzes why the top global consumer electronics retailer closed all its eight own-branded stores in China in February 2011 after a continuous decline in revenue. The case describes the operating model adopted by Best Buy in China, which was incompatible with Chinese market demand and expectations. Five Star Appliances, a Chinese electronics retail brand acquired by Best Buy in 2006, continued with its original operating model and generated profits. After the closure of Best Buy stores, Five Star Appliances followed a path of expansion. Case B covers the measures taken by its rivals in competing for market share after Best Buy closed its stores in China and lays the foundation for a discussion of whether Best Buy should re-open in China. The Industry Note describes the electronics retail market in China, including an analysis of consumers and major players.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".