Global Strategy

If one walk along a NW 13th Avenue towards north in the downtown of Portland, Oregon, you will enter a very busy and stylish area, called Pearl District. There have expensive Chinese restaurant ‘P. F. Chang’, exquisite furniture store ‘Sur La Table’ and many other dazzling luxurious stores around this district; also, the famous organic market ‘Whole Foods Market’ is located here. The Whole Foods market is famous for its healthy foods, high prices, safe supply chain and organic products. Moreover, with the burgeoning growth of organic foods in markets, many other markets like Safeway, Trader Joe’s and Costco. They started focusing on organic foods as well, because organic foods are a big market for them. According to Whole Foods history, the CEO Mr. Mackey’s original idea was that create an interesting supermarket called “Saferway”, and the name being a spoof of Safeway in 1978. However, Mr. Mackey and Whole Foods did really well in supermarket industries within the last 30 years. After the economic recession in 2008 to 2009, Mr. Mackey had a plan to continue his business expansion in the first quarter of 2010, and he invited me to assess their financial statements and prospects. It goes without saying that Whole Foods must continue its expansion in 2010 even though they faced many difficulties during the entire economic recession.
First of all, from the microscopic analysis, the data of current ratio, quick ratio, gross profit, net income and total revenue from the financial statements of Whole Foods. The first are current ratio and quick ratio, they are a financial method to measure a corporation’s capacity to pay current liabilities which using assets that could be turned into cash in the next term and the ratio should absolutely be higher than 1.0, and 2 or higher are better; however, if the result is lower than 1.0, the corporation faces difficulties in operation. After calculation, the current ratios were 93.46% and 154% in 2008 and 2009 respectively (Whole