Hermes International

Hermes International Company is the second strongest brand in luxury industry. They have spent more than 100 years to make Hermes name as famous as today. With 3,000 million euro in average revenue, Hermes has a very strong financial position and potential growth compare to other competitors. Their products are always well-designed, high quality, and fashionable. They do not make good products but extremely good ones. Hermes’ target customers are wealthy people who have high level of income and are interested in luxury items. With more than 300 stores all over the world, Hermes is working on their ways to expand their distribution network and make their products available more in different markets. Besides the threats of strong competitors such as Gucci or Louis Vuitton, Hermes International has to deal with replica products which are selling with a huge amount in black market. These duplicate products have negative effect to Hermes not only in sales revenue but also in brand image. For now, all luxury brands are still looking for the solution for this problem. With a great system of management, Hermes has achieved a lot of success. Patrick Thomas’s leadership helped Hermes expand a lot in Asian countries and will expand more in the near future. He also decided to have their own crocodile farm which reduces cost of raw materials and threat from suppliers. Due to using massive amount of crocodile’s skin, Hermes also has unsolved problem with animal protection organizations. This unethical production will also harm to Hermes’s image and create negative reaction from some parts of consumers

Corporate Social Responsibility and Share Repurchases: European Evidence

As corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular topic, many studies have been investigating the connection between CSR and the nature of corporate finance, such as capital structure and cost of debt, asymmetric information, investment efficiency and dividend payout. However, there are not many studies capturing the relationship between CSR and share repurchase – which is a new global tool of payout policy. On the other hand, most of the studies focus on the US market. Thus, the literature on the relationship between CSR and share repurchase is quite limited in the European market. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the impact of CSR performance on share repurchase payouts of listed companies in the STOXX Europe total market index (STOXX Europe TMI). Firstly, the outcomes of this thesis can give general information on whether responsible companies are acting responsibly when using share repurchase as a payout channel or not. Secondly, stakeholders and policymakers can have a better view of the motives behind the share repurchase activities of responsible companies. The motivation between CSR performance and share repurchase payouts is developed based on life cycle theory, agency theory, signaling theory and stakeholder theory. Besides the independent variable - CSR performance which is represented by ESG score and ESG components, the research is also joined by five control variables namely, cash holding, profitability, growth opportunity, leverage ratio and company size to analyze the dependent variable – share repurchase payout. The dataset includes 2 578 observations from 523 listed companies in STOXX Europe TMI over the period from 2006 to 2019. The regression results reveal that there is a positive and significant relationship between CSR per-formance (total ESG score) and share repurchase payout. Nevertheless, the impact on the share repurchase payout of each ESG component is not the same. The positive relationship is mainly driven by the social and governance dimension. Specifically, the governance dimension has the greatest impact on share repurchase payout

Physical Activity Level in School-aged Children during COVID-19

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, school-aged kids are not engaging in normal physical activities per usual, such as physical education class and team sports. This paper addresses the health concerns and community perspectives of decreased physical activity in pre teens and teens during this pandemic. Further, it provides recommendations to stay active for 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1774/thumbnail.jp