Word: profitably
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...Mexico HSBC acquired and recapitalized a local bank, Grupo Financiero Bital, for $1.9 billion in 2002, and now that country is the fourth largest profit generator for HSBC globally (after the U.S., Britain and Hong Kong). The success in Mexico has been spurred by an unusual marketing campaign. Executives discovered that the HSBC name is a tongue twister in Spanish, so it launched ads to teach Mexicans how to pronounce the brand correctly. In one TV spot, a man in an HSBC tie leads a crowd at a soccer match in an H-S-B-C cheer...
...clock is ticking for the Americans, however, and here's why: Detroit loses money on passenger cars. (Trucks have always been profitable.) The problem was a long time coming, as Japanese and later Korean automakers scored annual gains in quality, profitability and market share. But U.S. automakers were lulled into complacency in the 1990s by the supersize profits of their SUVs (light trucks, technically), which just a decade ago earned profit margins as high as 25%. Ford was an innovator with its Explorer model and just kept making them bigger. Meanwhile, the Japanese started making good SUVs...
Ford Motor is in much better shape than GM, in part because it is smaller by about one-third in the U.S. While GM is awash in red ink, Ford Motor overall is still profitable, thanks to trucks like the F-150 and its finance and global business, which includes Mazda, Volvo and Land Rover. (Another brand, Jaguar, is losing money.) On the cost side, the U.S. carmakers are dragged down by the huge burden of benefits for retired workers, such as health care, which account for $930 of the cost of each of GM's vehicles, $560 of Ford...
...skeptics still call Ford a hypocrite. Some environmentalists challenge him for producing huge, smog-spewing trucks. Ford counters that his job is to make the company as environmentally sound as possible while making a profit. The new F-250 Super Chief concept truck, unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in January, epitomizes the company's dual mission: the gigantic, superdeluxe truck is equipped with everything big, including brown leather club chairs and flat-screen TVs. The surprise is that it is designed to run on any one of three fuels: hydrogen, a mixture of 85% ethyl alcohol or gasoline...
...build 3,000 FedEx Kinko's stores over the next five years, including 1,000 overseas. Many of the new locations will be just 2,000 sq. ft., a third as big as most current outlets. That will cut costs, and the result, May hopes, will boost morale and profit margins, which have been sagging. "At FedEx, we talk about walking barefoot 24 miles in the snow to deliver a customer's package," says May. "I want FedEx Kinko's employees to have a dose of that [spirit] as well...