Gateway Inc. Gateway, Inc., founded in 1985, started with two people working out of an Iowa farmhouse. With a "keep it personal, make it simple" philosophy Gateway, Inc. has grown rapidly since it went public 8 years after the company started. Today, Gateway is a 7.5 billion Fortune 250 company that has 19,000 people on its payroll and prides itself on building lifelong relationships with its customers.4 The company operates sales and technical support centers on four continents and has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Malaysia, Singapore, and Ireland.4 The following vision, values, and mission statements best state the core of this company, which has led to its great success: Vision: To be the leading marketer of personal computer products in the world.2 Values: Respect, caring, teamwork, common sense, aggressiveness, honesty, efficiency, and fun.2 Mission: To profitably grow our business faster than the competition by better understanding and serving the desires of our customer and aggressively marketing the highest value directly to our chosen markets.2 In the following, I will be detailing how Gateway has risen to power based almost solely on its innovative marketing technique and reviewing the company's current and past figures. MARKET SHARES Gateway has been very successful the last five years. Since January 1995, the value of a share has risen roughly 700%. Gateway has heavily outperformed the S&P 500 as a whole. SALES FIGURES In 1998, Gateway had a global revenue of $7.5 billion as it shipped 3.54 million systems during the year.5 Gross profit for last year was $1.545 billion.5 So far this year, sales are up with a six-month total of $4.0 billion with 2,089 million sys... ... middle of paper ... ...that Gateway does now.6 There is a need for local technology competency centers designed for small and medium businesses. While the reseller community serves this function within specific project areas, there is a value in a single, local organization that ties this together to provide strategic value. The service and expert advice provided at the Business Solutions Centers, Gateway feels, are vitally important to the success of small and medium businesses. Gateway wants them to feel that they deserve it. CONCLUSION Essentially there is one marketing tactic that has carried Gateway. The personalization strategy has helped set Gateway apart from all of its competition. The Gateway motto is "Humanizing the Digital Revolution" and it shows. Gateway has worked very hard to create an image, and people have responded by buying their products by the millions.
Riordan has identified criteria in four areas that define the company’s mission statement. First, the company focus is to have attitudes and abilities that exceed industry standards to provide solutions for customer’s challenges and lead the industry in Research and Development. Second, the mission for customer relationships is to be a solution for the customer, maintain quality, innovation, and customer service at a reasonable price. Third, to ensure the long-term viability of the company, the mission to the employees is to have an innovative and team oriented working environment, in addition to keeping the employees informed and supported. Lastly, the future of the company depends on maintaining profitability to allow growth in the company (Apollo Group, 2004).
I recommend a strong buy on Cisco’s stock with a target price of $32.50, a 50% upside from its current price. Cisco has a solid competitive advantage, because there are not many strong competitors in the market. The other firms show a higher P/E ratio than Cisco because they have a lower market share. The company shows a constant growth. Cisco markets its products globally with the highest market shares than its competitors. The main risks for Cisco are worsening of economic conditions or exchange rates. The company has a good growth in sales, which will lead higher profits. The company also gives out an annualized dividend to its shareholders every year.
For many customers, our competitive advantage lies in our global network. We offer enterprise-grade network services in 182 countries representing 99 percent of the world’s economy.
In light of an evolving market, faced with new competitors, and after a careful analysis of their current customers, the Vanguard Group (hereinafter referred to as “Vanguard”) realizes it must rethink its entire marketing strategy. However, in order to protect and leverage their competitive advantage, which is their low management fees, and to optimize the loyalty that their customers continuously demonstrate toward their organization, they must now target the most profitable segment for them, and develop the best way to serve and delight these customers.
Most companies’ primary goal is to maximise profit in order to remain competitive in the market. The concern usually arises in the measures and approaches companies take to achieve that goal and how it will benefit in the short-term and long-term process. (Eccles, 2011)
The first chapter in this book explains a business’ mission and values. When discussing the mission, Welch states that in order to create an effective mission statement, one must explain how they intend to win in that particular business. The key is profitability, “Delineate their strengths and weaknesses in order to assess when they can profitably play in the competitive landscape,” (Welch, 15). This means to define the business’ strong and weak points to evaluate where they can efficiently and profitably fit within that specific business sector’s scheme. In order to come up with the mission, one can receive input from any source, but one should especially listen to the intelligent ones from all of the different sectors. Although, it is the responsibility of the top management or whoever is held responsible for it, to put it in place, it is their “defining moment,” (Welch, 17). The mission is what a business plans to do to win and values are ...
Cisco is one of Americas greatest corporate success stories. Since shipping it’s first product in 1986, The company has grown into a global market leader that holds No.1 or No.2 market share in almost every market section in which it participates. Cisco went public in 1990 on the nasdaq stock market with annual revenues at $69 million in that year. But now their revenues are at $12.2 billion in fiscal 1999. Their revenues in the last four quarters are shown in the figure below.
During 2003-2007, cisco registered a top durable top line growth period. They take a strong ability to manufacture and design new products with how the new world processes information. They have strong strategic industry partners and they have a good customer relationship. Cisco is a company that focuses on their core competencies. When they monitor and manage more than 10,000 devices, it becomes time consuming. Even with these problems cisco systems does have many strength...
4 company’s skills and objectives, the customers they were trying to attract, the competitors they
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Historically, the financial performance of Seagate and the rest of the disk drive industry had been extremely
Mission- to provide values to the lives of customers, to make the lives of partners worthy, concern about environment and community
In writing the business plan, I determined our target market and our marketing strategy to gain a share of the market. I also had t...
The key changes taking place in the online industry in 1995 are the introduction of the Microsoft network and the coming of use of the Internet World Wide Web which offered alternative channels to content providers that provided more control over their offerings and potentially higher revenues. Microsoft Network took only a 30% commission fee (versus 80% taken by AOL from its content providers’ revenues) from its content providers and offered providers the option of choosing any format and font to display their content (versus the standard screen displays offered by AOL and its rivals). Also, the per-hour pricing policy offered by Microsoft was superior to AOL’s. With the development underway of a way to provide on-line currency collection, the World Wide Web offered huge incentives for providers to start publishing material on the internet by their own means without having to go through a middle-man such as an online provider. Both of these offerings do not bode well for AOL’s future prospects due to the huge incentives for customers and content providers to switch to these alternative distribution channels.
1998 – Cisco is the first company to achieve market capitalization of $100 Billion in just 14 years.