Yingfeng Ku

Due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of companies are considered to curtail or delay their dividend to shareholders, to keep the company afloat in the situation of declining revenues. The shareholders should regard this as normal because everyone’s dividends are affected in some extent, however, for the shareholder of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest dividend payers, they did not think so. Royal Dutch Shell cut its payout in April for the first time since the second world war. Jessica Uhl, chief financial officer at Shell, reiterated that the dividend cut was the “prudent and appropriate thing to do” and reflected the “real reality” presented by the pandemic. These explanations seem are feeble for its shareholders and drew criticism, the reason is the Shell company did not provide information on how it planned to allocate capital in the coming years.   Cut dividends that have not changed for years, and unknown capital allocation in the future, I belie...

Things have not been good for Victoria's Secret (VS) in 2020. With revenues falling by years and the impact of epidemic, its owner Leslie Wexner, is considering a ‘potential sale’. Before that, VS had experienced two booms. The first was when its founder, Raymond, opened a store that sells women underwear to men in 1977. He earned $500,000 first year. But it did not last long, a sales bottleneck occurred. Its strategy of making men its main customers led to women could not accept it, and there were limited number of male customers. After 1982, Raymond sold VS to Wexner, VS’s sales model focuses on female customers. Wexner led VS toward luxurious and noble route. This marks the beginning of another glorious in VS. From 2016, VS reached another turning point, sales revenue become stagnate and drop, share prices began to fell and shops closed. Until scandals surfaced of VS in 2020, it has hit the bottom again.   One shop of Victoria’s Secret, photo’d in Nanjing Both experienced ...

 When people browsing the news in finance, the title with an unbelievable mount of money can always catches their eyes, for example: ‘Stanhope merges with FWM to create $24.2bn wealth manager’ And people could see that: London-based Stanhope runs $13bn in assets under management and oversees the investments of the Duchy of Lancaster, the £538m portfolio of property and financial assets owned by the Queen (Flood, 2020) . “ People in finance just have so many money” They might say something like this. The same thing happened to me, when the first time my relatives and mates know about that I am a student major in finance, they said: “That is great! You will be rich after you find a job.”   Some people think that those people who working in financial industry can earn a lot of money and have a higher wage standard compare with other industry. Imagine a person in a suit and working in office could completing transactions values of hundred million in a couple of minutes...