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
Our case study deals with Mass Merger. Since the 90s, together with the globalization of business, Mergers and Acquisitions have developed at an incredible pace. Thus, companies from all over the world can be lead to work together as one single corporation. Moreover, the world has become interdependent not only economically, but also culturally, that is to say one culture may influence another one or different cultures can be mixed. It is then obvious that intercultural issues have to be solved.
ADM’s competitive advantage is the fact that it is able to reduce fixed cost by large scale production, known as economies of scale. The company has manufacturing, distribution, and sales facilities located in the U.S., Canada, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Since ADM has all of these locations around the world, it has the capacity and capability to produce its products in massive quantities. Cost per unit is lowered by spreading fixed costs across a larger product base and this allows ADM to be price competitive within the industry.
Establishing strategic alliances, such as Myer, Itochu Corporation, Inchcape BHD, wishlist.com). This created new distribution channels, new intellect resource base and new markets.
Economies of scale: Timken has started consolidating operations into global business units to reduce costs. They have expected annual savings of $80 million by the end of 2007 after Torrington’s acquisition.(case) As large size is usually expected to yield production economies if manufacturing operations can be amalgamated, marketing economies if similar distribution channels can be utilised, and financial economies if size confers access of capital markets on more favourable terms.(book).Moreover, by reducing the combined sales forces, Timken expected to realize significant purchasing synergies by giving much large volume to a reduced list of suppliers in exchange for price reductions. One analyst estimated that those
(1) Synergy creation: The businesses of both companies are famous and highly complementary to each other.
When a certain point is reached regarding a company’s success, a set of different opportunities arise and partnerships may unfold. However, with every possible strategy available, risks and benefits also come into play; without discarding any of them beforehand, every option is a strong candidate until a final decision is made. In this case study we will analyze the current business strategy pertaining
Growing through integration can have a positive effect on the competitiveness of a business in that firms are able to buy out or merge with other large powers in the market to make a ‘super power’ in the market. This ‘super power’ gains a larger % of the market as the two original
A broader view of objectives indicate that long-term opportunities exist in areas such as supply chain improvement, acquisition synergies, and increased pharmaceutical sales. The merger with Alliance Boots provides a ripe platform for negotiation
It is believed that at the root of any business strategic merger is to expand. This expansion could be in the form of a larger operations leveraging resources, enhanced opportunities or too simply unite with another business to reduce expenses. Ford and Volvo explored the option of teaming up in hop of lowering manufacturing cost.
Seeing all the negative and positive aspects, vertical integration is much better and useful than horizontal integration. Vertical integration is more controllable as the expansion is within the firm only. Thus it is less rigorous. The collaboration or merging act can be less controllable as the previous firm is now dependent upon the new merged firm. Trust is the main key in horizontal integration as it can be a loss in case the other merged firm can be fraudulent.
Each company has chosen to participate in the joint venture rather than operate its own wholly owned subsidiary because each joint venture partner in Slimline benefits from the others unique knowledge and expertise. Mast industries provides a vast network of clientele, Courtaulds provides great production power due to it being the largest apparel manufacturer in the UK, and MAS provides Slimline with the world’s first carbon-neutral textile facility. Each partner brings something to the table that the others cannot, which is why they chose to participate in the joint venture.
Because Navistar is a major trucking company, they are constantly striving to keep their lead by innovating new technologies within their industry. One of Navistar’s main strengths is the ability to gain strategic alliances with other firms in the industry, not only national, but also international. A strategic alliance is an alliance where two or more firms create a legally independent company to share their resources and capabilities to develop a competitive advantage. These advantages enhance a firm’s marketplace success.
Aegis Analytical was a start-up, manufacturing process software provider, developing solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. The company was founded on managerial know-how, established by two co-founders with in-depth knowledge of the manufacturing domain and software know-how, developed their flagship product called Discoverant. Discoverant was a revolutionary product that offered a solution to highly complex problems in the manufacturing process of pharmaceutical companies. The software had the following features: it collected data during the production process, tracked failures and then analyzed the data to give sophisticated bases for solutions to managers. Aegis aspired to be the recognized leader in the process
Growth in business can come in two different forms, internal or external (Aktas, de Bodt, & Samaras, 2008). A type of external growth, which relates back to a cooperative strategy, is a merger conducted between two corporations. An example of this is reflected in the merger between Polaris Industries and Indian Motorcycles, in that both brands could have continued success under the leadership of Polaris Industries (Polaris Industries, Inc, 2011). Currently, Polaris Industries is conducting an internal growth by increasing their financial contributions to research and development (Polaris Industries, Inc, 2017). This type of internal growth will allow Polaris to expand its product lines and competitive
Mergers and acquisitions have developed to be a widespread occurrence in modern era. A merger of the size like Adidas-Armani has repercussion for the labor force of these companies transversely to the world. Although the integration of units gives an immense arrangement of significance to monetary issues and the effects, there are still some issues are the most commonly ignored ones such as human resources, financial management, marketing, sales etc.. Ironically studies confirm that the majority of the mergers not succeed to convey the preferred results because of people associated concerns. The ambiguity resulted by badly handled management issues in mergers and acquisitions have been the foremost grounds for these collapses.