I’m working on a case study and looking for the answers of the following questions:

1- Noto37 is the flagship product for Chinese pharma and is targeted at cholesterol/blood pressure market segment. While Chinese Pharma has a sizable market share of 40% in this segment, the segment has become highly competitive and is attracting new entrants. What can Chinese pharma do in order to protect its market dominance in this segment? What strategic framework would you use to analyze this case?

2- Refer to Exhibit A: Sales Forecast and Data – based on the July 2009 – March 2012 data, what would be the forecast for April – June 2012 (consider April – June 2012 as the holdout period) using Simple Exponential Smoothing with smoothing parameter (alpha)=0.2?  Explain how variations of the smoothing parameter (alpha) impact the forecasting accuracy. Please feel free to make assumptions if any data is not available. You can use any accuracy measure of your choice.

3- Given the seasonality and trend in the time-series (Exhibit B), what recommendation would you make on other forecasting methods that could improve accuracy on the holdout data? Why do they improve the accuracy?