Who has benefited from the recession???

The recession has cause problems for most company's with people like Woolworths going out of business, and other big companies losing a lot of money, but for some companies is has been the most profitable time of the business cycle for them.

I am going to speak about a business that has done very well in the recession, and a business that the recession has been a threat to and a hard time.

Primark, this business has had an increase of profits of 8% to £252 million this is pretty good in a boom, but in a recession this is amazing, but how have they achieved these increased profits?

Primark is a cheap retailer, because they are cheap and people have less disposable income, more people look for cheapness and less at quality, this is basically Primark.

They have achieved sales of £1.1 billion, this is because they are cheap and people are not bothered about different brands on clothes, but there profit margins are under pressure, this is because of the exchange rate from the sterling to the dollar, because much of Primarks clothing is sourced in dollars, this has means they get less clothing for their money, because the pound is weaker.

Even though Primark shows its low prices and tries to get the lowest costs on their products possible, but what has been sacrificed to achieve these low, low costs.

One thing is the quality of the product, as much of Primarks clothing could be seen as "tacky" and "cheap", this could turn out bad for the company very soon as we are coming out of the recession, this means for the business that people might go towards other better quality products because of their increase in disposable income and will probably stay away from stores like Primark.

Another thing could be there ethical views. In 2005 Ethical Consumer Magazine as the least ethical of the main clothing stalls in the UK. This is because there was allegations that children in India was actually making there clothes, this would of dropped there sales in clothes because people did not like Primark's ethical rules, this could stop repeat business and lose a lot of their profit.

A business that hasn't done well in the recession is Land rover, they have only made £55 million in the last 3 months of 2009 but the quarter before they made a loss of £60 million, this is due to the recession and people not being able to afford the big cars expensive cars they sell.

To cut costs they had cut there week down to 4 days so they was only producing cars from Monday to Thursday, also they will cut some night shifts so they are not wasting money by paying workers to produce a minimum amount of work.