Electronics Co.

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Prompt

Your client is Electronics Co., an audio/video sales and repair retailer with 500 stores located primarily on the West Coast. In Year 0, revenues were $520M from repairs of equipment (e.g. TVs, DVDs etc.) and $400M from sale of equipment (primarily TVs).

Electronics Co. has been in business for 30 years and is known for its fast, professional service. However, profits have been flat for the past 4 years and competitors have not seen similar problems.

The client wants to know why its competitors are outperforming Electronics Co. Also, they want to know how Electronics Co. can improve its profitability.

How should we approach this problem?

Case Overview

In this Bain case, the client has hired you to help stop a decline in profitability. In addition, you’ve been tasked with understanding why competitors are doing better than the client in recent years. Your job is to dig into the profitability to discover the underlying root issues, and ultimately, give the client a recommended course of action to stop the decline.

Keeping the goal of profitability in mind, use the Profitability Framework to create your base structure for the case. However, you can work outside the basic framework to incorporate elements of the other basic frameworks that may help you better solve the problem.

Several math exhibits are waiting to be interpreted by you. This case will be valuable in helping you prep for a second round at Bain. The case has a score of 2 out of 4 on the qualitative difficulty scale.

Interview Pointers: Bain

Bain looks for candidates that exhibit practicality.

Apply that to this case by imagining yourself as a Project Manager having to assign out work-streams to a team of analysts. Does the structure you built facilitate those work-streams in an efficient manner?

Time yourself as you go through this case for optimal practice: 4 minutes for building a presenting the structure, 5 minutes for the math, 2 minutes for brainstorming, and finally, 2 minutes for your final recommendation.

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