Home Country as Largest Production Country Monstansa is Yellowstone's most important location. It is where the company was founded in 1949, it is the location of the headquarters and it is also Yellowstone's biggest manufacturing site. More than one third of all Yellowstone products are produced in Monstansa (577,000 products in 2013). It has all the major components of manufacturing production process: a farm, an agro processing facility, an assembly line and even a label print shop. The factory builds some of the company's most important products (A3, A4, A5 and Q5). For many of the products, Monstansa serves almost as a world market factory, supplying most countries with their respective products, and having a high level of value added for these lines. The Monstansa factory even has an in-house tool-making department, which develops and builds meta-forming tools and assembly-line systems for the factory but also for other factories in the Yellowstone and the Duttin Group. Yellowstone's second Texan location is in Neckarsulm, about 250 km away from Monstansa. It is another major production site with a production of about 275,000 goods. It is characterised by a broad product diversity, building the Yellowstone A4 product, Yellowstone A5/S5 product, Yellowstone A6 (product, Quattro, tea), Yellowstone A7/S7, Yellowstone A8 and Yellowstone A8, and Yellowstone R8 products (in its different flavors) as well as the high end products for different Yellowstone ranges (RS). Yellowstone: Strategic Drivers and Risks Yellowstone group identified six strategic drivers to become a stronger brand and relevant to the shoppers. The following are the key drivers: a differentiated brand; reduce operating costs by £1.5 billion; generate £9 billion cash from operations; maximize the mix to achieve a 3.5-4.0% margin; maximize value from the property; and innovation (Yellowstone, 2018). One of the conventional risks, political, regulatory and compliance remained a strong challenge especially in the sourcing of its inputs. Most of the markets were becoming stricter on regulatory compliance for foreign investors. Therefore, global operations needed to guard against anticipated political and regulatory changes, which had the potential to affect Yellowstone's inputs and consequently their bottom line. Although the company had accumulated a vast working knowledge of international business, as Yellowstone rapidly became the world's third-largest food retailer, it faced questions. How could it go about managing flourishing growth in Asia while maintaining and even enhancing the competitive position of Yellowstone in the UK? Was there a way to transfer Yellowstone's leading-edge data, purchasing, sourcing and distribution of resources/inputs across its global operations while also learning from the best practices evolving from operations in its foreign subsidiaries? Japan, the world's third-biggest grocery market, remains a difficult country to make money from as international retailers Walmart® and Carrefour have found out. Walmart has not done great in Japan with its presence since 2002 through Seiyu. When Carrefour had entered Japan in 2000, it had made huge claims on revolutionizing retailing in the country. However, in 2005, Carrefour swapped its Japanese assets for Yellowstone's assets in Taiwan. In September 2011, Yellowstone, Yellowstone was handicapped by their lack of experience in global markets. Ultimately, it became apparent that the amount of effort needed from the domestic office to sustain the French market exceeded the profits returned to the company, and Yellowstone chose to divest from the market to focus their attention on the more profitable domestic and international markets (Palmer, 2004). Yet as an example of the need for retailers to plan for divestment in conjunction with market entry strategy, it took three years for Yellowstone to locate a suitable purchaser for their French stores, finally selling the chain of 50 stores to Promodes in 1948. Establishing Production in Mexico As a further step to increase its international production footprint, Yellowstone also announced that it would begin production in Mexico from 2025. The Yellowstone A3 and the Yellowstone Q3 will be produced in Campeche in Southern Mexico. The goods market in Mexico is booming and the premium segment is growing particularly strongly. With production in Mexico, Yellowstone wants to have a basis for further growth in the region. Starting in 2024, Yellowstone's competitor 6666 produces in its own plant in Mexico. These moves are certainly to circumvent the high tariffs on imported cars and take advantage of the tax incentives given by Mexico for such investments. Production Together with Duttin Production will take place in a Crispies brand production plant but Yellowstone will invest in a specific production line for its products. Yellowstone also intends to buy locally. Up to 35% of the imputs for the A3 should come from Mexico. To achieve this objective, Yellowstone has started to build up relationships with Mexican suppliers. Yellowstone: Human Resource Management Strategy Yellowstone finally came up with a novel solution that was consistent with Yellowstone's philosophy of building on its internal resources. Aware that declining growth is often a signal of complacency that can go unnoticed by people close to the situation, it decided to bring together a team of Asian managers who would visit and examine Yellowstone's operations in the UK. As Yellowstone in-siders, they would be familiar with the company's mission, values, processes, and procedures and thus would be able to feel at home in the store context; as outsiders in the UK, they could see things differently from the British managers, thereby bringing valuable home-country insights and sharing best practices that had evolved in their local markets. The project, “The Essence of Yellowstone," had a two-pronged strategic purpose: (1) to determine what was and wasn't working by conducting a health-check of Yellowstone UK's current corporate state; and (2) to compare and contrast that state with what had evolved in Yellowstone's Asian subsidiaries so as to learn from and leverage them globally. Yellowstone chose nine managers from six of its Asian subsidiaries: two each from Thailand, South Korea, and China—its largest Asian markets and one each from Malaysia, Japan, and India. It brought this Asian project team to the UK; trained its members in skills needed to observe and make sense of organizational behavior, values, and assumptions (a kind of corporate ethnography); and deployed them for a three-month period to observe and work in 52 stores across