Useful terms and expressions

1. eponymous - одноименный

2. operating margin – чистая операционная прибыль, маржа

3. savvy hedging – со знанием дела, мастерски осуществленное страхование от потерь, искусное хеджирование

TEXT 15

Translate the article in writing. Give your opinion on Adidas’ strategy – is it a success? Substantiate your point of view and support it with a list of actual steps the company is taking to withstand the competition.

Underline the metaphoric and other figurative speech units which are used in the article. If the story is about a sport shoe manufacturer, then what type of metaphors would be logical to find in the article?

Adidas Pulls the Pseudo-Scarcity Trick with Stan Smith Sneakers

Adidas, slipping a bit in its ongoing game with Nike, is pulling a 50-year-old all-star off the bench. The German sneaker giant has re-released its Stan Smith model, one of its best-selling shoes of all time.

Leaning on a “classic” shoe is a no-brainer. The strategy requires no R&D, space-age materials, performance-measuring electronics or expensive athlete endorsements. Plus, if it’s marketed correctly, classic footwear becomes a story and a symbol—something at least a little bit greater than a product itself. Wilson can’t offer the same tennis racquet that it made in 1964, but Stan Smiths still basically sell themselves.

What’s more, Adidas executives executed their Stan Smith strategy as flawlessly as a Bjorn Borg drop shot. No doubt realizing the shoe’s half-century mark was fast approaching, they yanked the model from shelves in 2012. There was certainly no shortage in independent sneaker shops and on websites like eBay— after all, the company has sold 40 million pairs over the years—but the move primed the market with a sense of scarcity.

Then Adidas gave the sneakerheads a little something extra to get excited about. The new kicks come with three different color accents—or “colorways,” as the industry jargon goes—and buyers can put an illustration of themselves on the tongues where Mr. Smith’s mug has traditionally appeared, an option it’s marketing under the term “Stan Yourself.”

Even the 50-year peg was a bit of a marketing coup. Adidas did, in fact, start making the tennis shoe in the mid-1960s but it didn’t tie them to Smith until 1971, the year that he won the U.S. Open.

So why not wait for a big 50-year release in 2024? For one thing, Adidas could use all the traction it can get to keep pace with Nike’s blistering sales of late. Classic sneakers from the 1960s and 1970s are also having a bit of a moment lately. Vans, the skate-sneaker brand owned by VF Corp, has increased sales by almost 20 percent, on average, in the past four quarters. The shoes, known for their checkerboard pattern, have done particularly well in Asia and Europe.

Meanwhile, Nike’s Converse and its Chuck Taylor line increased sales by 16 percent in the past six months, more than double the pace of the company’s full line of products, including the spaceship sneakers it sells under the Jordan and Lebron lines. If the really old sneaker fits…

Bloomberg Businessweek

TEXT 16

Translate the article in writing.

Please scan the article on the major battle of our times and answer the questions:

Which are the three trends that worry economists and antitrust regulators most? Why is the situation worrying? How can it be remedied?

Read the article carefully to be ready to discuss its content in class.

The students may split into 3 competing mini-groups (teams) to provide perfect well-thought-of written translation of 1/3 of the texts (for your convenience, and to ensure proportionate workflow, the text has been divided into 3 parts by highlighting it in different styles). Mind that the teams’ performance will be rated as per the number of their mistakes and lucky guesses. All teams should translate the headline.

Battle of the internet giants: Survival of the biggest

Concern about the clout of the internet giants is growing. But antitrust watchdogs should tread carefully

THE four giants of the internet age—Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon—are extraordinary creatures. Never before has the world seen firms grow so fast or spread their tentacles so widely. Apple has become a colossus of capitalism, accounting for 4.3% of the value of the S&P 500. Some 425m people now use its iTunes online store, whose virtual shelves are packed to the gills with music and other digital content. Google, meanwhile, is the undisputed global leader in search and online advertising. Its Android software powers three-quarters of the smartphones being shipped. Amazon dominates the online-retail and e-book markets in many countries; less well known is its behind-the-scenes power in cloud computing. As for Facebook, if the social network’s one billion users were a country, it would be the world’s third largest.

The digital revolution these giants have helped foment has brought huge benefits to consumers and businesses, and promoted free speech along the way. Yet they provoke fear as well as wonder. Their size and speed can, if left unchecked, be used to choke off competition. That is why they are attracting close scrutiny from regulators.

Three trends alarm those who think the digital giants are becoming too powerful for consumers’ good. The first is the rise of winner-take-almost-all markets on the internet. Although Microsoft has poured money into its rival search engine, Bing, Google still accounts for over two-thirds of searches undertaken in America and 90% or so in some European markets. Facebook, too, enjoys a quasi-monopoly in the social-networking arena. Rivals fear that the big four will exploit their dominant status in their main businesses to gain an unfair advantage in other areas—a charge that lies at the heart of the antitrust case against Google.

Second, the giants want to get consumers hooked on their own “platforms”—combinations of online services and apps that run on smartphones and tablet computers. These platforms can be very appealing. Apple mints money because its hugely profitable iPhone has become a remote control for many people’s digital lives. But there are worries that Apple and its peers are creating “walled gardens” which make it hard for users to move content from one platform to another.

The third concern is the internet behemoths’ habit of gobbling up promising firms before they become a threat. Amazon has splashed out on firms such as Zappos, an online shoe retailer that had ambitions to rival it. Facebook and Google have made big acquisitions too, such as Instagram and AdMob, some of which have drawn intense scrutiny from regulators. So far the watchdogs have focused on surgical strikes, in areas such as online search and the e-book market (where Apple is under investigation for alleged cartel-like behaviour with several publishers).

Some critics argued that in the interests of promoting competition, big “information monopolies” such as Apple and Google should be forced to choose between being providers of digital content, producers of hardware or information distributors (via such things as cloud-computing services). The danger is that such corporate butchery would do more harm than good. The fact that people have flocked to big web firms’ platforms suggests that consumers are perfectly willing to trade some openness for convenience and ease-of-use. Switching to a new search engine or music service takes a matter of seconds. And this time, rather than there being one dominant player (as Microsoft was for a while), there is a war of all against all. 

Smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system have come from nowhere to dominate the market, eclipsing Apple’s iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle tablet is going head-to-head with the iPad. In social networking Google+ is fighting Facebook. And Facebook and Apple, along with Microsoft, now have designs on Google’s dominance in search. Smaller firms such as Twitter are also keen to join the giants’ ranks, and have rebuffed marriage offers from them. Facebook itself was a start-up just eight years ago. Microsoft’s antitrust problems now seem less vital than the fact that the 'giant squid’ failed to sense that the commercial currents had shifted against it. The four big fish nowadays also have a reputation for arrogance and plenty of enemies. If they really want to keep the trustbusters at bay, they should not let their size go to their heads.

The Economist