Tag Archives: Copy

How Do You Respond to a Price Increase from a Supplier? Six Points

Situation: A small company has a parts supplier for product that they sell to their most important customer. That customer’s specs are “copy exact” on components for existing products; also, their new products are usually based on existing components. The supplier significantly raised prices on the parts supplied to the company. How you respond to a price increase from a supplier?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • This is an extremely sensitive situation. One solution is to not to rock the boat. The reality is that the company needs the parts, and it will take a lot of effort to replace them with parts from an alternate vendor. Just continue the relationship. Quit worrying about it and milk it for as long as it lasts.
  • Find out what caused the supplier to raise prices. The supplier needs to understand that to preserve the company’s margins they may have to raise prices to the final customer. This may threaten both the company’s and the supplier’s business with the customer.
  • Make sure that the supplier understands the company’s costs: office, salaries, equipment, maintenance, and local regulations that are unfriendly to business and difficult to deal with. Ask them to reconsider or reduce the price increase.
  • Assure that the supplier understands the value that the company provides and the importance of this collaboration to the business and profits and bottom lines of both companies. Leverage this value to get the price that the company needs.
  • Renegotiate the relationship to assure that supplier can’t go around go around the company and sell directly to the final customer.
  • Start building relationships with alternate suppliers.

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What are Your Obligations for Use of Data? Five Perspectives

Situation: A company wants to add additional apps to its current service. One possible source is a website that aggregates and publicizes relevant information. The CEO is concerned about whether these data can be used by the company and whether using these data will expose the company to legal action. What are your obligations for use of data?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Under fair use you can use data processed from other sources and resell this. The key term is “processed.” This means that you must add some of your own value to the data. You cannot just republish data through your site as though you had collected and analyzed it yourself.
  • You cannot copy and repost a copyrighted article. Text is copyrighted, but extracted facts are not. If you want to use text from a copyrighted source, you must get permission from the author or publisher. You can quote a source by providing appropriate references.
  • You can include a link to a relevant site without taking copyrighted information.
  • If the data that you wish to use from another site contains information that includes personally identifiable data – data that would allow a third party to identify personal information about an individual and misuse that personal data to the detriment of the individual – then a distinct set of regulations apply. If you even suspect that this could be the case, seek legal counsel on your obligations.
  • When you are using the Internet, your audience is international. The rules for use of data derived from other sources differ by country or region. Consult your lawyer for general guidelines that will allow you to use data from other sources.

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