“When the Apogee Company had all its operations in one location, it was more profitable than it is today. Therefore, the Apogee Company should close down its field offices and conduct all its operations from a single location. Such centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintain better supervision of all employees.”



In the argument given to approve the centralization of the Apogee Company, I would like to negate this suggestion by providing the following points. While the main fact used in the argument, that the profits of the company were better when it was at a single location, the reasoning is flawed. There are innumerable forces that decide the profitability of the company and the reason for the argument to pick out one among them to support its cause is not convincing. The profits may have dropped, which the facts seem to implicitly state, due to various reasons; like market pressure, new competition may have entered the market or an existing competitor may have become more aggressive. There might even be a case where the market in that industry might have fallen down. A case in observation would be the many companies that were thriving during the dotcom bust. Many companies had expanded, like sify and yahoo, but due to the overall market collapse had to incur losses. An argument might be put across in this case that one of the reasons companies, like yahoo, were able to survive or stay in business was because they diversified into different locations and hence had a broader base.

The argument thus falters while providing proper facts for its conclusion. More statistics, like providing the market cap and percentage capture of the market, would have given more strength to the argument. Another reasoning that it uses referring to the cutting of costs does not hold weight, when globalization has proved that the current trend is the other way round. Where companies are opening up more branches to cut the costs.

Thus, the argument does not provide substantial facts to add weight to its conclusion to move the Apogee company back to a single location. The argument would have done better if it had weighed in more statistics, or revise its decision by conducting more research into the subject.