I have attached one case study. One reading about" ultrasound machines" , and one pdf with " ultrasound REAL questions to answer ". I emphasize real questions to answer because there are FALSE...

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I have attached one case study. One reading about" ultrasound machines" , and one pdf with " ultrasound REAL questions to answer ". I emphasize real questions to answer because there are FALSE questions at the bottom of the article. you must answer the questions from the pdf labeled "REAL QUESTIONS “ to answer . Theres one reading and one pdf that has 3 questions to answer. No posting questions. no cheggg, no course hero she is beyond strict and i graduate in 2 weeks. there are zero extensions this summer class as its one month long . This is 45% of my grade. Each question is one paragraph long, the department of this class is international business but the course is MKT 4593 "Special topics in digital mkt". giving a 6 day notice.


INTERNET MARKETING & GLOBAL BUSINESS Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business Department of Marketing & International Business Name:_____________________ Case Study Assignment - Ultrasound Machines, India, China, and a Skewed Sex Ratio · Ultrasound – a killing machine in India? · Sting Operators · India's Skewed Sex Ratio Puts GE Sales in Spotlight · Tracking devices in all ultrasound machines soon · Why many Indians prefer sons over daughters? Read the case study and review links above. Then do your best to provide answers to the questions below: 1. What should GE management, including the marketing team, do about this problem in India? Indian police raid illegal ultrasound centres to save unborn girls 2. Given the sensitivities around this issue, what type of digital marketing campaign would you run in India? What types of websites would you advertise in? What would you focus on? 3. Should the marketing strategy and tactics you proposed in India be the same or different in China? Please elaborate on your answer. 1 General Electric Co. and other companies have sold so many ultra- sound machines in India that tests are now available in small towns like Indergarh, where there is no drinking water, electricity is infre- quent, and roads turn to mud after a March rain shower. A scan typically costs $8, or a week’s wages. GE has waded into India’s market as the country grapples with a difficult social issue: the abortion of female fetuses by families who want boys. Campaigners against the practice and some gov- ernment officials are linking the country’s widely reported skewed sex ratio with the spread of ultrasound machines. That’s putting GE, the market leader in India, under the spotlight. It faces legal hurdles, government scrutiny, and thorny business problems in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. “Ultrasound is the main reason the sex ratio is coming down,” says Kalpana Bhavre, who is in charge of women and child welfare for the Datia district government, which includes Indergarh. Hav- ing a daughter often is viewed as incurring a lifetime of debt for parents because of the dowry payment at marriage. Compared with that, the cost of an ultrasound “is nothing,” she says. For more than a decade, the Indian government has tried to stop ultrasound technology from being used as a tool to determine gender. The devices use sound waves to produce images of fetuses or internal organs for a range of diagnostic purposes. India has passed laws forbidding doctors from disclosing the sex of fetuses, required official registrations of clinics, and stiffened punishments for offenders. Nevertheless, some estimate that hundreds of thou- sands of girl fetuses are aborted each year. GE, by far the largest seller of ultrasound machines in India through a joint venture with the Indian outsourcing giant Wipro Ltd., introduced its own safeguards, even though that means forsak- ing sales. “We stress emphatically that the machines aren’t to be used for sex determination,” says V. Raja, chief executive of GE Healthcare South Asia. “This is not the root cause of female feti- cide in India.” But the efforts have failed to stop the problem, as a growing economy has made the scans affordable to more people. The skewed sex ratio is an example of how India’s strong economy has, in unpredictable ways, exacerbated some nagging social problems, such as the traditional preference for boys. Some activists are accus- ing GE of not doing enough to prevent unlawful use of its machines to boost sales. “There is a demand for a boy that’s been completely exploited by multinationals,” says Puneet Bedi, a New Delhi obstetrician. He says GE and others market the machines as an essential pregnancy tool, though the scans often aren’t necessary for mothers in low-risk groups. Prosecutors in the city of Hyderabad brought a criminal case against the GE venture with Wipro, as well as Erbis Engineering Co., the medical-equipment distributor in India for Japan’s Toshiba Corp. In the suits, the district government alleged that the compa- nies knowingly supplied ultrasound machines to clinics that were not registered with the government and were illegally performing sex-selection tests. The penalty is up to three months in prison and a fine of 1,000 rupees. Both companies deny wrongdoing and say they comply with Indian laws. A GE spokesman said its legal team would be looking into the charges. Vivek Paul, who helped build the early ultrasound business in India, first as a senior executive at GE and then at Wipro, says blame should be pinned on unethical doctors, not the machine’s suppliers. “If someone drives a car through a crowded market and kills people, do you blame the car maker?” says Paul, who was Wipro’s chief executive before he left the company in 2005. Paul is now a managing director at private equity specialists TPG Inc., formerly known as Texas Pacific Group. India has been a critical market to GE. Its outsourcing opera- tions have helped the Fairfield, Connecticut, giant cut costs. The country also is a growing market for GE’s heavy equipment and other products. The company won’t disclose its ultrasound sales, but Wipro GE’s overall sales in India, which includes ultrasounds and other diagnostic equipment, reached about $250 million in 2006, up from $30 million in 1995. Annual ultrasound sales in India from all vendors also reached $77 million in 2007, up about 10 percent from the year before, according to an estimate from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, which describes GE as the clear market leader. Other vendors include Siemens AG, Philips Electronics NV, and Mindray Inter- national Medical Ltd., a new Chinese entrant for India’s price- sensitive customers. India has long struggled with an inordinate number of male births, and female infanticide—the killing of newborn baby girls— remains a problem. The abortion of female fetuses is a more recent trend, but unless “urgent action is taken,” it’s poised to escalate as the use of ultrasound services expands, the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a report. India’s “alarming decline in the child sex ratio” is likely to exacerbate child mar- riage, trafficking of women for prostitution, and other problems, the report said. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, recent census figures show sex ratios still favoring boys to girls by a wide mar- gin in India. GE sells about three times as many ultrasound machines in China as in India. In January, the Chinese government pledged to improve the gender balance, including tighter monitoring of ultra- sounds. Some experts predict China will be more effective than India in enforcing its rules, given its success at other population- control measures. Boys in India are viewed as wealth earners during life and light- ers of one’s funeral pyre at death. India’s National Family Health Survey showed that 90 percent of parents with two sons didn’t want any more children. Of those with two daughters, 38 percent wanted to try again. Although there are restrictions on abortions in this Hindu-majority nation, the rules offer enough leeway for most women to get around them. GE took the lead in selling ultrasounds in the early 1990s soon after it began manufacturing the devices in India. It tapped Wipro’s extensive distribution and service network to deliver its products to about 80 percent of its customers. For more remote locations and lower-end machines, it used sales agents. Ultrasound Machines, India, China, and a Skewed Sex Ratio CASE 2-8 CS2−25 cat12354_case2_CS2-1-CS2-29.indd 25 4/3/19 11:05 AM CS2−26 Part 6 Supplementary Material The company also teamed with banks to help doctors finance the purchase of their machines. GE now sells about 15 different models, ranging from machines costing $100,000 that offer sophis- ticated color images to basic black-and-white scanners that retail for about $7,500. To boost sales, GE has targeted small-town doctors. The com- pany has kept prices down by refurbishing old equipment and mar- keting laptop machines to doctors who travel frequently, including to rural areas. GE also offered discounts to buyers inclined to boast about their new gadgets, according to a former GE employee. “Stra- tegically, we focused on those customers who had big mouths,” said Manish Vora, who then sold ultrasounds in the western Indian state of Gujarat for the Wipro-GE joint venture. Without discussing specific sales tactics, Raja, of GE Health- care South Asia, acknowledges the company is “aggressive” in pur- suing its goals. But he points out that ultrasound machines have broad benefits and make childbirth safer. As the machines become more available, women can avoid making long trips into cities where healthcare typically is more expensive, he says. Indian authorities have tried to regulate sales. In 1994, the gov- ernment outlawed sex selection and empowered Indian authorities to search clinics and seize anything that aided sex selection. Today any clinic that has an ultrasound machine must register with the local government and provide an affidavit that it will not conduct sex selection. To date, more than 30,000 ultrasound clinics have been registered in India. GE has taken a number of steps to ensure customers comply with the law. It has educated its sales force about the regulatory regime, demanded its own affidavits from customers that they will not use the machines for sex selection, and followed up with peri- odic audits, say executives. They note that in 2004, the first full year it began implementing these new measures, GE’s sales in India shrank by about 10 percent from the year before. The sales decline in the low-end segment, for black-and-white ultrasound machines, was especially sharp, executives say. Only in 2006 did GE return to the sales level it had reached before the regulations were imple- mented, according to Raja. Complying with Indian law is often tricky. GE cannot tell if doctors sell machines to others who fail to register them. Different states interpret registration rules differently. GE also is under close scrutiny by activists battling the illegal abortion of female fetuses. Sabu George, a 48-year-old activist who holds degrees from Johns Hopkins and Cornell universities, criss-crosses the country to spot illegal clinics. The criminal case in Hyderabad against Wipro-GE, a company representative, three doctors, and an ultrasound technician fol- lowed an inspection that found one clinic could not produce proper registration and had not kept complete records for two years. A team of inspectors seized an ultrasound supplied by Wipro-GE. The inspection team’s report said it suspected the clinic was using the machines for illegal sex determination. The owner, Sarawathi Devi, acknowledged in an interview that her clinic, Rite Diagnostics, was not officially registered at the time of the inspection. She said the ultrasound machine was owned by a “free- lance” radiologist who had obtained proper documentation for the Wipro-GE machine but was not there when the inspectors had arrived. She denied the clinic has conducted sex determination tests. Later, Dr. Devi’s records show, she registered the clinic with the government and bought a Wipro-GE machine, a sale the company confirms. The court case was part of a wider dragnet spearheaded by Hyderabad’s top civil servant, District Magistrate Arvind Kumar. During an audit last year, Kumar demanded paperwork for 389 local scan centers. Only 16 percent could furnish complete address information for its patients, making it almost impossible to track women to check if they had abortions following their scans. Kumar ordered the seizure of almost one-third of the ultrasound machines in the district due to registration and paperwork problems. A suit also was lodged against Erbis, the Toshiba dealer. GE’s Raja says that, in general, if there’s any doubt about the customer’s intent to comply with India’s laws, it doesn’t make the sale. “There is no winking or blinking,” he says. A Wipro-GE representative is scheduled to appear at the Hyder- abad court hearing. An Erbis spokesman said he was unaware of the case in Hyderabad. A court date for Erbis had not been set. A visit to the clinic in Indergarh, a town surrounded by fields of tawny wheat, shows the challenges GE faces keeping tabs on its machines. Inside the clinic, a dozen women wrapped in saris awaited tests on GE’s Logiq 100 ultrasound machine. The line snaked along wooden benches and down into a darkened basement. On the wall, scrawled in white paint, was the message: “We don’t do sex selection.” Manish Gupta, a 34-year-old doctor, said he drives two hours each way every week to Indergarh from much larger Jhansi City, where there are dozens of competing ultrasound clinics. He said even when offered bribes, he refuses to disclose the sex of the fetus. “I’m just against that,” Dr. Gupta said. But he is not complying with Indian law. Although the law requires that clinics display
Answered 5 days AfterJul 07, 2023

Answer To: I have attached one case study. One reading about" ultrasound machines" , and one pdf with "...

Dipali answered on Jul 12 2023
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INTERNET MARKETING & GLOBAL BUSINESS
Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business
Department of Marketing & International Business
Name:_____________________
Case Study Assignmen
t - Ultrasound Machines, India, China, and aSkewed Sex Ratio
· Ultrasound – a killing machine in India?
· Sting Operators
· India's Skewed Sex Ratio Puts GE Sales in Spotlight
· Tracking devices in all ultrasound machines soon
· Why many Indians prefer sons over daughters?
1. What should GE management, including the marketing team, do about this problem in India?
The marketing staff at GE should move quickly to solve the issue of ultrasound equipment being mishandled in India. They ought to work together with the Indian government, healthcare providers, and nonprofit organisations that support women's rights and gender equality. Here are some actions they might take –
· Campaigns for education and awareness should be created and implemented by GE with a focus on healthcare professionals, expectant parents, and the general public. These efforts ought to emphasise spreading knowledge about the value of gender equality, the negative effects of sex-selective behaviour, and the moral use of ultrasound technology.
· Work together with medical associations: GE should collaborate with medical associations to create standards and recommended procedures for the moral application of ultrasound equipment. These recommendations should stress the significance of not revealing the gender of the foetus during routine ultrasounds and encourage technology use in a responsible manner.
· Improve compliance with regulatory requirements: GE should collaborate closely with the Indian government to improve the enforcement of current rules governing the use of ultrasound equipment. Increased licencing standards,...
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