West Marine Case Summary

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West Marine was started like many great companies, from very humble beginnings. The founder, Randy Repass, began the company from his love and adoration of boating. He loved being out on the water and wanted to create a company that made finding and buying boating supplies easier for consumers. In 1968 Repass started his first sales out of his garage in Sunnyvale California, selling nylon ropes by mail order. Repass began West Marine under the name West Coast Ropes because at first, that was his only product. The first West Coast Ropes store was placed in Palo Alto California in 1975. When the first store opened, the selection was very high in different kinds of ropes but, low in other boating needs. What West Coast Ropes was always known…show more content…
By dividing net sales by the company’s net income I got that West Marine’s net profit ratio is .29% this tells us that they are not getting to keep almost anything that they are making as revenue as part of their net income. However by calculating the company’s current ratio we can determine its ability to pay off its short term debt with its current assets the higher the ratio the more assets they have to pay off their liabilities. In the case of West Marine their current ratio is 4 with means that for every dollar of liability they owe they have four dollars in assets available to cover their debt. Under the notes to consolidated financial statements the company reveals that it hasn’t nor does it plan on paying any dividends in the foreseeable future, this is good information to know because as an investor one always wants to know what kind of return they will be getting from investing their money in a company. As an investor personally I don't think that I would invest into this company because apart from the fact that they don’t pay their investors dividends their stock prices aren’t very high and have been dropping for the past several…show more content…
Sales dropped by 8% as well as net income dropping from $14million to $1.1million. This drastic drop caused West Marine to change its operational approach from a “boaters first, businessmen second” philosophy to a more business oriented approach. West Marine strengthened its management and experience by hiring John Edmondson as president and CEO, who in turn hired a senior management team with retail experience in information technology, logistics and planning. Together they focused on distribution and the supply process. Improvements were made in the selection of products, advertising, the training of employees and investments in e­commerce. During this timeframe,mid to late 90’s, the company also worked on expanding internationally. With the majority of their international catalog being in 5 markets they decided to focus their catalog marketing on boating markets with few local services. By 1999 they had expanded their sales to 150 countries over 25 markets. To better facilitate this expansions and to emphasize customer service they printed order forms in 6 languages as well as a team of multilingual customer service reps to work
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