Methanex’s competitive strategic position and competitive scope have to date concentrated on focused cost leadership of being the world’s lowest delivered cost of methanol within the various regions it served. Methanex utilizes a singular corporate strategy, undiversified and focused solely on production, storage, and distribution of methanol, which has allowed it to become the leader within its industry, not only within production of methanol but also with setting global prices. Methanex took a leadership stance within the industry when it started publishing its Methanex Non-Discounted Reference Prince (MNDRP), which was quickly adopted by the industry as the general benchmark for methanol pricing.
Methanex has differentiated its business
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Methanex has a considerably smaller number of staff working at its production plants due to technological investments made to computerize and mechanize their facilities. This resulted in reduced staffing costs within facilities, providing a cost driver advantage that allows Methanex to spread fixed costs further and forward lower costs to their customers, retaining their position as a cost leader. After analyzing with the VIRO framework, once again this resource was determined to be a competitive parity due to easy replication from competitors since there was no protection of the technology and mechanization systems utilized.
The internal SWOT analysis also revealed some potential areas for Methanex to grow within the future, particularly in providing methanol to high-growth potential markets like the energy industry. In order to stabilize business within these growing sectors, Methanex should implement long-term contracts whenever possible with these energy producers in order to avoid spot price buys and to better predict future demand for
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Many of Methanex’s competitors diversify their offerings, including methanol as just one offering in their diverse portfolio of chemical production, which provides them with protection from fluctuations in the pricing of methanol and raw materials needed to produce it. Many general chemical competitors also only enter the methanol production market once pricing reaches comparative levels to that of a barrel of oil, which can cause an oversupply in the market and drive prices down.
Methanex’s sole focus being the cost-leader within the methanol industry also puts them in a dangerous position. If a competitor discovers a less-costly or more efficient method of producing methanol via innovations in technology, process management techniques, or due to partnerships and joint ventures with suppliers (vertical integration), Methanex would lose their key competitive differentiator within the market and would have to reevaluate their entire competitive strategy.
6 Methanex’s Undiversified Corporate
UST Inc. is a smokeless tobacco company with a long tradition and a recognizable brand name. A strong brand name can have lots of associations with high quality, revenues, soundness, growth, etc. But, this is one of the characteristics that can be like two edged sward. On one side, company with long tradition is expected to to operate in a stable and prosperous way as it always did, but on the other side, company itself can get too self confident and fail to see the newcomers and other threats. UST has ignored newcomers, and now they all have a growing market shares, while only UST Inc. total share, consequently, decreases. Smaller players are expanding their market share primarily by cutting prices, something that UST ignored. UST Inc. decided to fight competition not by decreasing prices, but with overstretching it product lines. However, this might not be the best solution. As the main player in the market, they had the better position to take on and win in the price war. If UST Inc. had been able to take this step, competitors probably would not be able to follow the price decrease imposed by the UST Inc and at least some of them would be shut down. So as one of the biggest drawbacks of UST's policy can be slow reaction to new market conditions and worse of all when they react the reaction is inappropriate.
Currently, the most important factor in the rise of gas prices is the increasing cost of crude oil. Unfortunately, the United States has three percent of the world’s oil reserves. (Horsley) In 2009, the United States was third in crude oil production as well as the world’s largest petroleum consumer. (e. I. Administration) Such consumption required and still requires the United States to import petroleum/crude oil from other countries.
Samsung’s cost advantage is clearly visible from the comparison of costs (and their elements) that were borne by the company and its competitors in 2003 (Tab. 3): Samsung’s overall cost was 24 per cent lower than the weighted average cost of the other four producers; two most significant elements of the cost structure, i.e. raw materials and labour, were 36 and 27 per cent lower respectively. When expressed by means of a relation of average selling price to costs (“productivity” of cost elements), the differences are even more visible (comp. Tab. 4 ): overall superiority of Samsung over its competitors exceeded 51 per cent!
This report comprises of the explanation of two different companies working in different market fields, the two companies I’ve chosen are Primark and Samsung I am going to write about the influence of the 4vs which are the volume of output, variation in demand for output, visibility of production, and variety of output. I am also going to look at the performance objectives in each of the companies. Example, for a given year and how they are able to reach their objectives, and also the effect on the cost efficiency of the operations.
The market is dominated by a few large suppliers rather than a fragmented source of supply. There are no substitutes for the particular input. The suppliers customers are fragmented, so their bargaining power is low. The switching costs from one supplier to another are high. There is the possibility of the supplier integrating forwards in order to obtain higher prices and margins.
There were fierce competitions among the producers that have scale and scope of operations which were similar to each other. For instance, the Pepsi Co. and Coca Cola companies have developed the strategy and infrastructure, which are hard for the local sellers to complete with them. However, there were still many producers including new entrants that try to access the market and compete seriously with low price and differentiation- strategies among rival...
...pital resources like distribution vehicles and storage warehouses should be outsourced to help reduce the high cost of operation which in turn can lead to reduction of its products price. The company should concentrate on product development and evolution and delegate distribution roles to outsourced firms. Such initiatives have worked well in the new Indian market and should be implemented in other areas.
The problem today is the gas companies make too much on their products. Shell's profits jumped enormously in only three months. The Company announced an 80% jump in earnings for the last three months, to $3.25 billion (Shell Posts Record Profits). Ethanol would allow these profits to go straight to
The task of this assignment is to complete a competitive analysis of two of the largest competitors in the industry of chosen study. This researcher’s chosen field is the Car Wash industry. Unlike many industries, the Car Wash industry does not have dominant players or franchise names that rule across the country. Unlike other automobile related industries such as oil change (Rapid Oil Change), tires and batteries (Goodyear), and auto parts retailers (NAPA), where these types of name players may have thousands of locations throughout the country, there are no big name players in the Car Wash industry. Although there are companies that own and operate multiple car wash facilities, most of these multi-location owners operate multiple locations throughout a metropolitan or regional area and their overall location totals are nominal. Since there is a lack of dominant competitors to analyze, this researcher will focus on an analysis between the two main categories of car wash ownership: full service vs. unattended operations.
The first issue, described by Ohmae as the Californization of Need, refers to the convergence of customer needs and preferences and the fact that the national identity of many high-quality products has virtually disappeared. Secondly, companies can no longer maintain a leadership position based solely on superior, advanced technology. This results because of the increasing number of critical technologies embedded in the majority of products, therefore, no one can keep the technology out of the hands of competitors around the globe. Thirdly, Ohmae emphasizes the importance of fixed costs. He believes that companies can no longer compete by keeping their variable costs lower than their competitors. The majority of costs incurred by companies these days are fixed costs, therefore, what matters is maximizing marginal contribution from fixed costs and a logical way to do this through forming strategic alliances. The final issue Ohmae identifies is dangers of equity.
John Deere’s ability to operate profitably throughout their business cycle has been through proper supply chain management, rigorous cost controls, and lean productivity John Deere shows ambition towards future sustainment with agricultural equipment solutions and a larger global presence in their construction equipment product line. While agriculture equipment has gotten more powerful and larger than original designs, John Deere understands the importance of increased technology and innovation to meet the needs of customers around the world. John Deere strives to meet the business conditions for their customers by developing cost strategies that meet the goals and expectations of the current customer base and future
The beverage industry is highly competitive and presents many alternative products to satisfy a need from within. The principal areas of competition are in pricing, packaging, product innovation, the development of new products and flavours as well as promotional and marketing strategies. Companies can be grouped into two categories: global operations such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Company, Monster Beverage Corp. and Red Bull and regional operations such as Ro...
For example: with the increase of the number of products produced, the cost of operating a machine also increase. Second we have batch level costs which is associated with batches; producing a multiple units of the same product that are processed together is called a batch. The third type is product level costs which arise from any activity in order to support the production of products. The fourth and the last type is facility level costs, this costs cannot be determined with a particular unit, product or batch; this costs are fixed with respect to batches, products and number of units produced. A single measure of volume is used for allocating costs to each service or product in traditional method for example: direct material cost, machine hours, direct labor cost and direct labor hours. A cost driver is an activity that generate costs, it can be generated by two types of costs the first is a particular machine 's running costs where the costs is driven by production volume as machine hours; the second is quality inspection costs where the cost is driven by the number of times the relevant activity occurs as the number of
An oligopolistic market has a small number of sellers dominating market share and therefore barriers to entry are high. These sellers are highly competitive and do not act independently of each other. Access to information is limited so sellers can only speculate of their competitor’s actions. Sellers will take advantage of competitor’s price changes in order to increase market share.
The second way is to achieve low direct and indirect operating costs is gained by offering high volumes of standard products and offering basic no-frills products. Production costs are kept low by using less parts and using standard components. Limiting the number of models produced to ensure larger producti...