When Ron Johnson took the helm at J.C. Penney, he told The Wall Street Journal about his high hopes for the chain. “The department store is king of the hill in most countries I go to,” he said. “That’s what we want to achieve at J.C. Penney.” Unfortunately, the maestro behind Apple’s amazingly profitable stores was less successful, to put it mildly, in his 17 […]
For just about anybody in the business world, the term “metals” immediately calls to mind the fast-paced trading action of places like the London Metals Exchange, where fortunes rise and fall each day based on the flux in demand for aluminum, zinc, nickel, tin and a host of other metals. As a former metals analyst, I can attest to the fact that a veritable army […]
When creditors hired Tiger Group to liquidate the assets of Sherwood Brands, a U.S. candy manufacturer and distributor, the sale followed what might be thought of as today’s “new rules for maximizing asset recovery.” These new rules reflect the expanded role we believe we must play to be competitive in today’s fastpaced and more complex business culture. At some point, one could argue, we opened […]
This past June, the equipment and inventory formerly owned by bankrupt Quantum Foods in three Bolingbrook, Ill., buildings fetched in excess of $13 million in a turnkey, going-concern sale to West Liberty Foods, LLC. The transaction, coordinated by Tiger Group, City Capital Advisors, LLC and Schneider Industries, was just the latest to illustrate how the creative approaches of today’s disposition firms—often working in strategic partnerships […]
Thanks to the astonishing growth in the power and complexity of data-gathering technologies, the role of analytics is looming larger than ever at businesses of all types and sizes. Indeed, c-suites everywhere buzz with talk of “big data” and its potentially transformative role. And when it comes to asset-based appraisals in the wholesale, retail and manufacturing sectors, it is certainly true that analytical reporting — […]
Explosions and firefights are part and parcel of today’s videogames, but a different sort of “creative destruction” is at play within the industry itself. After decades in which video games were available mostly on physical media like discs and cartridges, the arrival of trends such as mobile gaming, digital downloading and cloud computing promises to change the way people buy and play video games in […]
Ineligible inventory – a category of assets that banks avoid lending against – can represent a double-edged sword for asset-based lenders. On the one hand, lenders know that when they don’t lend against such items as raw materials, samples, in-transit goods, or slow-moving inventory, they can often leave themselves a cushion to recoup value and mitigate risk. On the other and, experienced lenders are not […]
Mall-based teen apparel retailers have struggled over the past few years amid growing competition from lower-priced “fast-fash¬ion” chains such as H&M and Forever 21, as well as the likes of off-price retailer TJ Maxx and Internet players ranging from Amazon to Zappos.
But retail CEOs have more to worry about. They are particularly concerned about broader trends at play in teen apparel retailing, including high unemploy¬ment […]
In an ongoing effort to capitalize on the rapidly expanding prescription drug market in the U.S., pharmacy operators are placing a premium on prescription volume. A given pharmacy location’s volume is represented by the prescription file — also known as the script list within the pharmacy industry—which represents the number of prescriptions filled over a given period of time. A closer look also reveals that […]
For the past several years, high-volume hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) has helped the U.S. energy sector extract more and more petroleum and natural gas from shale and other deposits deep beneath the surface of the earth. The development of this technology in itself would be a boon to borrowers in oil and gas. But it happens to also coincide with a string of truly massive […]
