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Alliance Management At Forbes Marshall

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Forbes Marshall (FM), a company that initially specialized in supplying textile accessories to the Western Indian Market, has truly transformed the competitive industrial landscape of the 20th and 21st century by being a leader in joint ventures, technological innovations and strategic investments. By forming alliances with more than 10 companies in a range of markets, FM rapidly grew through the industry life cycle and ultimately became a leader in process efficiency and energy conservation in Asia, Europe and North America. This report will highlight why FM chose to engage in alliances instead of acquisitions as its primary method of creating a competitive advantage as an innovative global manufacturing firm. Horizontal integration …show more content…

Conducting any type of merger in any foreign market exposes the companies involved to a variety of differences in cultural and operational matters across different borders. Through forming strategic alliances, FM collaborated & conducted operations with companies that share the same core values without educate themselves on the different cultural norms these companies face with their specific customer segments. A number of important competences were gained from these alliances that FM previously lacked - strengthening the company as a leader in Marketing and Sales, Logistics, R&D and ultimately customer satisfaction. Although these synergies would have still been present through an acquisition, an alliance was more favorable as they didn’t force the entities involved to change culturally or operationally, but allowed them to voluntarily improve their operational competencies and strengthen their competitive advantage. From a strategic perspective, this worked out very well, since customer preferences weren’t affected by these joint ventures, and demand for entity specific products continued to grow. 4) Operational Synergies- For FM, reaching out to an international customer base, benefits from economies scale through production, and learning innovative competences were the primary reason why they engaged in alliances. For example, FM gained a significant portion of Codel’s

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