Business Ethics

Name: Alex Yu

Article: Rolls-Royce Pushes Focus on Singapore

Date: 9/20/2013

Summary:

Rolls-Royce PLC, the British aircraft and marine-engines maker has faced several serious problems which affect the company's reputation. In 2010, faculty parts in engines supplied by Rolls-Royce caused a flight to make an emergency landing in Singapore, damaging this company's reputation seriously. And the company was alleged corruption by company officials in Indonesia and China last year, challenging the company in business ethics. In order to shift the attention from the negative news, the company is investing $550 million plant in Singapore. After talking about the mistake of the A380 engine incident and the issue of using intermediaries in certain overseas markets, Jonathan Asherson, Rolls-Royce's regional director for southeast Asia and the Pacific, talked the importance of Asia market, the invest in a Singapore engine plant and how the invest would benefit Singapore and the company. With this interview, the company is trying to indicate its attitude towards the issues and its great efforts to get closer to the customers so that it can take back the lost reputation and confidence in customers.

Critique:

When the quality issue and ethics issue occur at the same time, the company will suffer serious negative influence in reputation and trust of customers. Unfortunately, Rolls-Royce is in such tough situation,facing the engine incident and the corruption charge by the SFO. In this situation, the most necessary thing for a company is to resolve the issues and take some specific actions to ensure that the issues will never happen again rather than trying to shifting the attention from this bad news to its new invest in Singapore. For Rolls-Royce, i think it can't win the reputation and customer confidence back just with saying that the company has resolved the problems and has strengthened the compliance procedures and the manufacturing and quality assurance...