CASE STUDY
1. Evaluate Panasonic’s business strategy using the competitive forces and value chain models.
Panasonic is one of the world’s leading electronics manufacturers. To be effective, their goals, objectives, culture, and activities needed to be consistent with their strategy. In order to increase their profit margin, they had to find ways to reduce costs and increase sales. For Panasonic, this meant that they needed to create a common set of data across all of their collective businesses and streamline their operations.
Competitive Forces:
· Substitute products or services — the threat of substitute products is high when there are many alternatives to a product or service and low when there are few alternatives from which to choose. Ideally, Panasonic would like to be in a market in which there are few substitutes. However, in the electronics market, products can be easily duplicated by competitors. For companies who are “first to market”, the competitive lead is often short lived. Competitors duplicate products and many will be offered with more features and at a lower price.
· Customers’ bargaining power — buyer power is high when buyers have many choices of whom to buy from and low when their choices are few. To reduce buyer power (and create a competitive advantage), Panasonic must make it more attractive for customers to buy from them than from their competition. Consumers expect the price of new technology to decrease over time, and they would not accept price increases. In today’s global economy, customers quickly search the Internet to locate competing product offerings and pricing structures.
· Suppliers’ bargaining power — supplier power is high when buyers have few choices of whom to buy from and low when their choices are many. Supplier power is the converse of buyer power. Panasonic is a very large manufacturer of electronic