Airwide Case Study

Airwide International is a rapid growing company of commercial and residential air conditioning systems in Europe. The company is broadly broken up into four divisions, one of which is Italy (Western Europe). Italy will be the country that the current dillema will be held in. Airwide shares competition with approximately 75 different manufactures of various air conditioning units. The existence of Asian companies has intensified the competition. Italy is the largest producer of air conditioning units but they are only found in j12 percent of homes. This is significantly low considering the United States has an average of 71 percent in homes. This is a problem that Airwide has been evaluating for some time. Since Airwide would like to increase the percentage of air conditioning units throughout Europe, especially Italy. It came to no surprise that a dealer from Genoa approached the company in hopes to persuade them to sell the units at the higher discount. Giacomo Marino, the dealer, stated that if he were to purchase the price to distributer for each unit, that his sales would increase sales because the salespeople would get the opportunity to take away business from retailers that sell Asian brands.
Airwide International is facing a common problem that most companies of their size go through. Should the dealer maintain title of a dealer but pay the same for the air conditioning unit. This has been an ongoing proposal from Nuova Climatizzazione to Airwide. The dealer would like to be granted the same financial status as a master distributer. Nuova has proven its success in their numbers. They serve approximately 320 accounts located in Genoa. In this proposal, Nuova stated that if they were to receive the higher discount this will increase Airwide sales by 20-25 percent in the next two years. One of the main concerns Airwide has with this proposal is that they have a master distributer in the northern region who believes the dealer will take