Healthy sales in the WhiteWave-Alpro segment and cost containment efforts benefited the quarter.

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Apple will still lag in the mid to low-cost segment, failing to garner strength outside of mature markets such as the U.S. and Western Europe.

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More likely, their longer-term growth will bump up against the ceiling of a European market in which the contestable low-cost segment is smaller than it is in the U.S., and well-established packaged-tour operators and national-flag carriers can block deeper inroads into the leisure- and business-travel segments.

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Similarly, an ill-conceived or poor performing policy not only does not grow the intended sector or segment, it often even fails to recoup the cost of the specialized tax treatment and associated programmatic costs.

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Now he has one major task to tackle, and it's harder than trimming any cost: to engineer and build great, profitable, desirable vehicles in every segment, for weakened brands such as Buick and Pontiac, and for strong brands such as Chevy, Cadillac and GMC.

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For example, a CEO may decide that the following goals are essential: Increasing products or pipeline, improving distribution channels, making cost structures flexible to cyclicality, accelerating quality improvement, and establishing market leadership in a given segment or geography.

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