Hand phones are standard paraphernalia among university students. Factors that motivate them to own the gadget would be of interest to both the students as well as marketers. Hand phone usage is an unexamined field in academic literature, this exploratory study attempts to investigate student purchasing motives in cellular phone markets. It also intends to know the student’s satisfaction with the different services and its future impact on socio economic changes. In this study, undergraduates (n=336) were requested to specify their purchase criteria of hand phone. The instrument used in the study to collect feedback from the respondents contains a combination of open-ended and scaled questions, and some background demographics. The study employed content analysis, Pearson’s correlation, and t-tests as the primary tools to analyze the responses. Results show that brand was rated as the most important factor in student purchase decisions. Other factors, arranged in decreasing order of importance comprise price, product quality, features, durability, availability, promotion, and post purchase service. Brand and price correlated significantly. It is also observed that there is very little difference regarding preference between brand and price in purchasing a hand phone. Marketers may formulate suitable strategies out of the findings to promote hand phones to university undergraduates in Malaysia by emphasizing at brands and price.

The purpose of this research is to be acquainted with the awareness and approval of halal supply chain among Indian manufacturers and distribution network members for haulage and warehousing activities from the perception of respective service suppliers. A total of 20 respondents, which consist of 10 transportation companies and 10 warehousing companies from the State of Andhra Pradesh in India were selected for the study by using purposive sampling method. The principal focal points of the discussions are on awareness and adoption of halal transportation and warehousing services chosen for the study in the comprehensive halal supply chain. A total of 90 percent and 70 percent of respondents from the transportation and warehousing companies respectively agreed that they know only about the concept of halal but do not have any exposure and ken on the halal supply chain. However, findings of this research won’t have extensive validity in the market, gaining an enough familiarity with the halal supply chain in the Indian social context is of immense importance. This is a pioneering attempt aimed to investigate the awareness and adoption levels of halal supply chain among Indian businessmen which are precious for supply chain companies to customize their services in the country as well to the world of academia.

This research is carried out to investigate the relationship between sustainability practices and performance in a financial sense for Malaysian Oil and Gas sector. Objectives include to study the state of sustainability disclosure among Malaysian oil and gas companies, to understand if companies that practiced sustainability had better performances to their financial bottom-line and to conduct a data analysis to understand the relationship between Environmental, social and governance performance [represented by the acronym ACSI] and financial performance. Sustainability performance is measured using ACSI checklist, which is an adaptation of the GRI 3.0 by Global reporting initiative while financial performance was measured on financial and profitability parameters namely EBITDA, EPS and PE ratio. Secondary data sources are used which were then converted into a rating scale to develop quantitative data. SPSS 21 is used for the analysis. The result shows that the majority of oil and gas companies in Malaysia had poor performance in terms of sustainability disclosure. On all three chosen profitability parameters, the companies that practiced sustainability were found to perform better than their counterparts that did not. Strong and significant relationship exists between sustainability practices and better financial performance.