N.V. Philips (Netherlands) and Matsushita Electric (Japan) are among the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. Their success was based on two contrasting strategies – diversification of worldwide portfolio and local responsiveness for Philips, and high centralization and mass production for Matsushita.
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands began as a small light-bulb factory in Holland, and by the turn of the century, was one of the largest producers in Europe. One-product focus made Philips a leader in industrial research which stimulated product innovation. Consequently, product line was broadened significantly and the flow of exciting new products and ideas continued through the years. Limited domestic market soon forced Philips to grow internationally. The foundations for what was to become one of the world's biggest electronics companies were laid.
Philips’ major rival, Matsushita, started as a small electrical house-ware manufacturer in 1918. The company expanded rapidly and soon introduced a flood of new products. By the end of the century, Matsushita grew into a global player with powerful brand names such as Panasonic, Quasar Technics, and JVC.
However, during the 1990s, Philips and Matsushita both faced major challenges to sustain their position in the market. Changing profile of the industry and globalization forces made Philips and Matsushita’s organizational models and competitive advantages obsolete, and brought up the need for drastic actions. At the brink of a new century, the battle of two giants unraveled with CEOs from both sides implementing another round of strategic initiatives and restructurings. The pressure put on new CEOs was enormous – wrong st...
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...ies. This kind of competition can only hamper their growth. It is time for them to work with each other and unite in the face of growing competition to ensure success in the new century. New century does not have to bring a new round.
Both companies’ changing strategic postures and organizational capabilities led to the major restructuring each company was forced to undertake as its competitive position was eroded. However, it is extremely difficult to overcome deeply set administrative heritage. Although Matsushita and Philips followed different strategies - classic "global" and "multinational" models respectively, both of them proved to have limitations.
With a near total saturation of the consumer electronics market, companies need to look beyond their boundaries and add value to their offerings, and sometimes it means total reinvention of the company.
GE was also required to operate more efficiently to cover the high cost of long term investment. Not only built research centers in several locations around the world, GE also increased their research & development budget by 14%. GE started to do their R&D processes by themselves, instead of merger and acquisition. As it took longer time to develop products, GE’s profit could not be gained in a short term.
Achieving world class business performance is a major challenge in today’s society. Manufacturing companies continue to face increased competition and globalization from its competitors. (1, p. 148). The automotive industry is one of the most volatile manufacturing industries that we have, which was evident in the 2008 – 2010 automotive industry crisis. (2) This global financial downturn served notice to the American automotive manufactures to raise the bar, in order to achieve word class business performance. General Motors, one of the country’s largest automotive manufactures, had to receive a government bailout to survive. During this time many with the corporation asked themselves, if we were a world class business, would we be facing this pending crisis. The answer was a resounding “NO”. General Motors has come out of bankruptcy and is focused on being a world-class business organization.
Two major competitors in the global consumer electronics industry, Philips of the Netherlands and Matsushita of Japan, both have extensive histories that can be traced back more than a century. They have each followed different strategies and have had significant capabilities and downfalls along the way. In general, Philips built its tenured success on a portfolio of responsive national organizations. On the other hand, Matsushita based its global strategy on a centralized and efficient operation through Japan. As they developed and reorganized their international strategies, each company was forced to undertake its strategic posture and restructuring as its competition position fell.
Komatsu, the largest Japanese corporation that manufactures heavy equipment, was established in 1921 as a specialized producer of mining equipment. In this case, the company had been through a lot of circumstances, some of them had raised the company status and some of them not. Initially, when the Japanese government allowed the foreign investors to roll and share the market in the region. In the other hand, before that situation happened, Komatsu was held a market share of more than 50%, despite the low quality of its equipment at that time. In my opinion, most of the changes that took place within the organizational structure and strategies of the company over the years had caused
Marks & Spencer is a perfect example of a company that had a successful strategy but failed to adapt to the changing environment and have therefore suffered from ‘strategic wear-out.’
Today, advances in technology and design are providing many opportunities for new and existing businesses to re-invent themselves and their marketing strategies.
The challenge was to overcome the overall resistance to change and find a way to get the organization behind ArcTech Flooring, the new specialty product. A culture of customer disengagement and communication problems among divisions along with past norms held by key senior managers made initiating radical innovation difficult. These norms made up the division's mechanistic organizational structure, incentives that are based on overall sector performance, operational competencies, and low risk culture, all of which hindered innovation. This paper explores the leadership challenges involved in managing strategic change in a highly mature Arctic Timber Engineered Woods Division.
Sony-which started up at 1946 in Japan. We are professional in mobile, video games, TV and computer etc. We have produced many which is influential to the world, such as, Walkman, Trinitron TV, video game (play station) and mobile phone. We have leaded the market for a long time and brought many new technologies to the market, such as, Trinitron display technology. In the other word, we can say that Sony is the best in this industry.
that made the company one of the most recognized companies of the world. The dynamic
Although a technological giant now, Samsung did not start off that way. In fact, Samsung did not start off as a technological company at all. Samsung was founded in South Korean by a man named Lee Byung-Chull in 1938. Samsung actually started off in the grocery ind...
Samsung is an innovative company that focus highly on quality and specialised products, they became an electronics company in 1969 and they released their very first mobile phone in 1988. In 2006, they became the global leading brand within the television market and in 2011, they became the latest smart phone provider in the world and their successful innovation is furthermore expanding. Today Samsung Electronics has proven to be one of the most successful global brands to follow.
The XYZ Corporation was established in 2004 and their main office is located in Vancouver, BC. The company’s main objective is to create new innovating technology for media devices, computers, and digital music players. They deal with the design, manufacturing and marketing of the products. XYZ Corporation has been providing Canadians with groundbreaking technology throughout the years and continues to create new technology to provide others with top-level technology. Although, recently their success rate has appeared to drop rapidly due to a number of factors that will be explored throughout this case study. Their main objective is to target the problems so that they can work towards having the issues resolved as quickly as possible. If they do not take any course of action, the state of the company may be in extreme danger. This case study is designed to explore the areas of the company and discover the problems blocking the XYZ Corporation from success.
This case traces the strategic decisions of Intel Corporation which defined its evolution from being a start-up developer of semiconductor memory chips in 1968 to being the industry leader of microprocessors in 1997 when it ranked amongst the top five American companies and had stock market valuation of USD 113 billion.
Panasonic Case Study (Graphics Not Included) Panasonic operates under the umbrella of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
Atlas Eléctricas vision is to be the leading company in the markets where it operates with competitive products worldwide. This does not match with the current organisational design which has a domestic functional organisation structure. Atlas Eléctrica will have to redesign its organisational structure into a more international oriented structure in order to correspond to the strategy, otherwise it will not be able to realise the strategy. This may be a difficult task for Atlas Eléctrica since its corporate heritage is based on the country similarity theory and since it has acted according to what is familiar right from the beginning.