Strategic plan for the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Peru

The purpose of this thesis is to present a Strategic Plan for the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Peru, with a vision for 2030, when the bank should become a preferred, profitable, secure, and innovative financial institution with a focus on bilateral business between Peru and China. D’Alessio’s (2008), The Sequential Model of the Strategic Process, was adopted for the planning; ICBC Peru’s public reports and interviews to its employees have been used to acquire relevant information. Firstly, ICBC Peru’s vision, mission, and so on, are defined and then, the external and internal conditions are analysed. Opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses are then identified through Tridimensional, Porter’s Diamond, PESTE, Five-Forces, AMOFHIT, and so on, and have been used in SWOT to generate twelve strategies, from which eight are retained through SPACE, BCG, IE, and GS analysis. The vision is then divided into actionable long-term objectives to combine with the 5 strategies to generate short-term objectives and their respective conditions, such as organizational structures, policies, evaluation tools for the implementation and revision. The main findings for ICBC Peru in this thesis are: the main opportunities, externally, are the likely future growth of Peru’s GDP, internal demand, and investment; and the main threats are corruption, governmental administrative capacity, and natural disasters; internally, the main strength is the group support; and the main weaknesses are the small equity and lack of effective localization. The eight retained strategies need to solve this external and internal situation by means of: diversification (retail banking & tailored services), market penetration (more marketing), alliance with local banks (localization), and product development (Fintechs introduction).El propósito de esta tesis es presentar un Plan Estratégico para el Banco Industrial y Comercial de China [ICBC] Perú, con una visión para el 2030, año en el cual el Banco ha de convertirse en una institución financiera preferida, rentable, segura e innovadora con un enfoque en negocios bilaterales entre Perú y China. Se adoptó el modelo secuencial del proceso estratégico para la planificación propuesto por D’Alessio (2008). Con la finalidad de adquirir información relevante se utilizó los informes públicos y las entrevistas a los empleados de ICBC Perú. La visión, misión de ICBC Perú fueron definidas primero para pasar al análisis de las condiciones externas e internas. Las oportunidades, amenazas, fortalezas y debilidades se identificaron a través del Diamante Tridimensional de Porter: PESTE, Five-Forces; y se utilizó el AMOFHIT para generar doce estrategias, de las cuales ocho se conservan a través de SPACE, BCG, IE , y análisis de GS. Luego, la visión se divide en objetivos a largo plazo para combinarlos con las cinco estrategias para generar objetivos a corto plazo y sus condiciones correspondientes, como estructuras organizativas, políticas, herramientas de evaluación para la implementación y revisión. Los principales hallazgos de ICBC Perú en esta tesis son: externamente, las oportunidades principales son el probable crecimiento futuro del PIB, la demanda interna y la inversión de Perú; y las principales amenazas son la corrupción, la capacidad administrativa del gobierno y los desastres naturales; internamente, la principal fortaleza es el apoyo grupal; y las principales debilidades son su escasa equidad y la falta de una localización efectiva. Las ocho estrategias retenidas buscan resolver esta situación externa e interna a través de: la diversificación (banca minorista y servicios personalizados), penetración en el mercado (más mercadeo), alianza con bancos locales (localización), y el desarrollo de productos (introducción de Fintech).Tesi

Micro/Nano Gas Sensors: A New Strategy Towards In-Situ Wafer-Level Fabrication of High-Performance Gas Sensing Chips

Nano-structured gas sensing materials, in particular nanoparticles, nanotubes, and nanowires, enable high sensitivity at a ppb level for gas sensors. For practical applications, it is highly desirable to be able to manufacture such gas sensors in batch and at low cost. We present here a strategy of in-situ wafer-level fabrication of the high-performance micro/nano gas sensing chips by naturally integrating microhotplatform (MHP) with nanopore array (NPA). By introducing colloidal crystal template, a wafer-level ordered homogenous SnO_2 NPA is synthesized in-situ on a 4-inch MHP wafer, able to produce thousands of gas sensing units in one batch. The integration of micromachining process and nanofabrication process endues micro/nano gas sensing chips at low cost, high throughput, and with high sensitivity (down to ~20 ppb), fast response time (down to ~1 s), and low power consumption (down to ~30 mW). The proposed strategy of integrating MHP with NPA represents a versatile approach for in-situ wafer-level fabrication of high-performance micro/nano gas sensors for real industrial applications

Predictive Value of 18F-FDG PET/CT-Based Radiomics Model for Occult Axillary Lymph Node Metastasis in Clinically Node-Negative Breast Cancer

Background: To develop and validate a radiomics model based on 18F-FDG PET/CT images to preoperatively predict occult axillary lymph node (ALN) metastases in patients with invasive ductal breast cancer (IDC) with clinically node-negative (cN0); Methods: A total of 180 patients (mean age, 55 years; range, 31–82 years) with pathologically proven IDC and a preoperative 18F-FDG PET/CT scan from January 2013 to January 2021 were included in this retrospective study. According to the intraoperative pathological results of ALN, we divided patients into the true-negative group and ALN occult metastasis group. Radiomics features were extracted from PET/CT images using Pyradiomics implemented in Python, t-tests, and LASSO were used to screen the feature, and the random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) were used to build the prediction models. The best-performing model was further tested by the permutation test; Results: Among the four models, RF had the best prediction results, the AUC range of RF was 0.661–0.929 (mean AUC, 0.817), and the accuracy range was 65.3–93.9% (mean accuracy, 81.2%). The p-values of the permutation tests for the RF model with maximum and minimum accuracy were less than 0.01; Conclusions: The developed RF model was able to predict occult ALN metastases in IDC patients based on preoperative 18F-FDG PET/CT radiomic features

The Fabrication of Au@C Core/Shell Nanoparticles by Laser Ablation in Solutions and Their Enhancements to a Gas Sensor

A convenient and flexible route is presented to fabricate gold noble metal nanoparticles wrapped with a controllable ultrathin carbon layer (Au@C) in one step based on laser ablation of the noble metal targets in toluene-ethanol mixed solutions. The obtained metal nanoparticles were <20 nm in size after ablation, and the thickness of the wrapped ultrathin carbon layer was 2 nm in a typical reaction. The size of the inner noble metal nanoparticles could be controlled by adjusting the power of laser ablation, and the thickness of the ultrathin carbon layer can be controlled from 0.6 to 2 nm by laser ablation in different components of organic solution. Then the resultant Au@C core/shell nanoparticles were modified on the surface of In2O3 films through a sol-gel technique, and the hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas-sensing characteristics of the products were examined. Compared to pure and Au-modified In2O3, the Au@C-modified In2O3 materials exhibited a revertible and reproducible performance with good sensitivity and very low response times (few seconds) for H2S gas with a concentrations of 1 to 5 ppm at room temperature. Evidence proved that the ultrathin carbon layer played an important role in the improved H2S sensor performance. Other noble metals wrapped by the homogeneous carbon shell, such as Ag@C, could also be prepared with this method

Reliability Evaluation of Multiple DCFP System subject to Shifting Threshold

This paper focuses on system reliability analysis with dependent competing failure process due to soft failure and hard failure. Some new probabilistic methods based on cumulative shock model and nonlinear Wiener process under different shifting thresholds situation are obtained. Considering that nonlinearity exists extensively in practice, the continuous soft failure process is governed by random effected nonlinear Wiener process. Firstly, reliability evaluation models for hard failure and soft failure are obtained under the cumulative shock, respectively. Furthermore, some system reliability models under different shifting thresholds situation are studied, in which failure threshold will decrease after a certain number of shocks. A real numerical example about fatigue crack growth dataset is carried out to demonstrate the proposed procedure. Numerical results indicate that both random shocks and shifting threshold have significant effect on system reliability. Finally, some sensitivity analysis are also been given

Radially Symmetric Solution for Fractional Laplacian Systems with Different Negative Powers

By developing the direct method of moving planes, we study the radial symmetry of nonnegative solutions for a fractional Laplacian system with different negative powers: (−Δ)α2u(x)+u−γ(x)+v−q(x)=0,x∈RN, (−Δ)β2v(x)+v−σ(x)+u−p(x)=0,x∈RN, u(x)≳|x|a,v(x)≳|x|bas|x|→∞, where α,β∈(0,2), and a,b>0 are constants. We study the decay at infinity and narrow region principle for the fractional Laplacian system with different negative powers. The same results hold for nonlinear Hénon-type fractional Laplacian systems with different negative powers

Synthesis and Characterization of WO3/Graphene Nanocomposites for Enhanced Photocatalytic Activities by One-Step In-Situ Hydrothermal Reaction

Tungsten trioxide (WO3) nanorods are synthesized on the surface of graphene (GR) sheets by using a one-step in-situ hydrothermal method employing sodium tungstate (Na2WO4·2H2O) and graphene oxide (GO) as precursors. The resulting WO3/GR nanocomposites are characterized by X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results confirm that the interface between WO3 nanorod and graphene contains chemical bonds. The enhanced optical absorption properties are measured by UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectra. The photocatalytic activity of the WO3/GR nanocomposites under visible light is evaluated by the photodegradation of methylene blue, where the degradation rate of WO3/GR nanocomposites is shown to be double that of pure WO3. This is attributed to the synergistic effect of graphene and the WO3 nanorod, which greatly enhances the photocatalytic performance of the prepared sample, reduces the recombination of the photogenerated electron-hole pairs and increases the visible light absorption efficiency. Finally, the photocatalytic mechanism of the WO3/GR nanocomposites is presented. The synthesis of the prepared sample is convenient, direct and environmentally friendly. The study reports a highly efficient composite photocatalyst for the degradation of contaminants that can be applied to cleaning up the environment