Apple Case Study
1. Historically, what were Apple’s major competitive advantages?
To have a competitive advantage a company should have a right strategy, consequently to have distinctive competences and as a result to have good resources and capabilities, which bring high profitability to the company. In our case the competitive advantages of Apple is differentiation and innovation, high quality, great customer responsiveness, high level of marketing and having strong sales department. By recruiting Steve Jobs Apple did its first steps. They have done a good research and according to the results offered their production. By having good marketing and sales and good customer responsiveness Apple gained loyal customers. This means that Apple has good capabilities and resources. Moreover, Apple has done an innovation in the world of technology with a high quality by creating different types of products and new hardware and software design. The new technology made the customers satisfied and they felt unique by holding the Apple products in hand.
2. Analyze the structure of the PC industry. How have the dynamics of the PC industry changed? Are the dynamics favorable or problematic for Apple?
I am going to analyze PC industry by help of Porter’s 5 forces: -Rivalry: The current rivalry is very high and Apple faces competition from IBM, HP, Dell and etc. The rivalry is very strong and aggressive and the PC industry also has very low switching costs. -New entrants: This threat is low because for setting up this industry the companies need considerable investment to make and the existing companies have already made strong brand awareness, so new entrants would be unwilling, although there is a scope for White-box PC’s having a share of 36% world-wide in 2006. -Power of Suppliers: In this industry there are two kinds of suppliers` memory chips, keyboards, disk drivers which have lots of suppliers and microprocessors and OS suppliers which are a few. In this case suppliers adjust the
To have a competitive advantage a company should have a right strategy, consequently to have distinctive competences and as a result to have good resources and capabilities, which bring high profitability to the company. In our case the competitive advantages of Apple is differentiation and innovation, high quality, great customer responsiveness, high level of marketing and having strong sales department. By recruiting Steve Jobs Apple did its first steps. They have done a good research and according to the results offered their production. By having good marketing and sales and good customer responsiveness Apple gained loyal customers. This means that Apple has good capabilities and resources. Moreover, Apple has done an innovation in the world of technology with a high quality by creating different types of products and new hardware and software design. The new technology made the customers satisfied and they felt unique by holding the Apple products in hand.
2. Analyze the structure of the PC industry. How have the dynamics of the PC industry changed? Are the dynamics favorable or problematic for Apple?
I am going to analyze PC industry by help of Porter’s 5 forces: -Rivalry: The current rivalry is very high and Apple faces competition from IBM, HP, Dell and etc. The rivalry is very strong and aggressive and the PC industry also has very low switching costs. -New entrants: This threat is low because for setting up this industry the companies need considerable investment to make and the existing companies have already made strong brand awareness, so new entrants would be unwilling, although there is a scope for White-box PC’s having a share of 36% world-wide in 2006. -Power of Suppliers: In this industry there are two kinds of suppliers` memory chips, keyboards, disk drivers which have lots of suppliers and microprocessors and OS suppliers which are a few. In this case suppliers adjust the