Eaton Corporation PLC. versus Parker Hannifin Corporation

What type of strategy has Nucor followed? Which of the five generic strategies discussed in Chapter 5 is Nucor employing? Is there any reason to believe that Nucor has achieved a sustainable competitive advantage over many of its steel industry rivals? If so, what type of competitive advantage does Nucor enjoy?

The three main competitive strategies are cost leadership, differentiation, and price strategy. Cost leadership focuses on acquiring raw material of the highest quality at the lowest price. In return this company can lower production cost with the goal of being the company with the lowest production cost in the industry. Differentiation strategies allow companies to make their products stand out from the others. Differentiation can be actual or perceived. Actual differentiation occurs when the company creates products that are not available elsewhere. Perceived differentiation takes a lot of marketing and advertisement to convince the consumer that this company’s product is superior. Price strategy includes a variety of strategies that cause a particular product to be marketed at the lowest price possible. Price strategy includes skimming where companies set a high initial price only to turn around and lower it. Bundle pricing occurs when several products are offered for one price. Promotional pricing allows other incentives to buy such as buy one get one half off. Using the pricing strategies causes many consumers to actually purchase more believing that they are receiving a “deal” while the company is still profiting. Competitive strategies are always used by companies and are often used together. Companies that understand how to combine competitive strategies fare much

Differentiation strategy is generally reserved for companies with a clear competitive advantage. Companies such as Mercedes and Apple employ this strategy. Differentiation strategy is demonstrated when a company provides value to customers through unique unique features and characteristics of a company's products rather than by the lowest price (Open Learning World 2010).

He invented Generic Competitive Strategies that are vital to compete in any industry. His strategies are: cost leadership strategy, differentiation and focus, which is divided into cost focus and differentiation focus. If one company is to follow the cost leadership strategy, it should try to increase its profits by reducing costs and charging average prices. The differentiation strategy is an opposite way – the company that follows this strategy often has higher prices for its services, but it is different and more attractive than its competitors. Focus strategy means that the company that follows it concentrates on some niche market. The division of focus strategy means that one companies can try to be successful in cost leadership, while focusing on a niche market and other companies will follow differentiation strategy.

The overall strategy undertaken by the team while investing in R&D was to tackle two major issues: price and energy density which represented the desired features required by customers.

3.How these strategies are related the performance of these companies over time? Why? What is going on in terms of industry competition and markets that makes one strategy outperform the other at any point in time?

Any change in our strategies is based on Porter’s Five Forces to analysis and implement the market, and complement with the results of Industry Scoreboard and Market Snapshot.

About GE transportation‘s example, we can see that the strategy came in a good moment, just after the big failure of AC6000 that happened because they misread the market and developed a product that was not solving any special need of their customer and was not foreseeing the future of the industry, that‘s were EVO project ventures, some say that you can‘t make the same mistake twice and certainly with EVO project GE didn’t made that because now they achieve to understand where the industry was going and how they could be the best ones offering a punctual and accurate solution to the specific needs of the locomotive field. After this, they pretend to go further by working in the hybrid engine, that offered a really complex system of batteries that storage the energy produced on breaking to use it as fuel and save big quantities of money and at the same time reducing considerably the emissions caused by diesel and gas.

In this part, this report focuses on Porter’s Generic Strategies to analysis the strategic positioning of the major play in toys and games industry. According to Dess, Lumpkin and Eisner 2010, Porter’s Generic Strategies include three strategies which are Differentiation, Focus and Cost leadership which a company can use for achieve competitive advantage and overcome five force.

Competition is stiff within the industry. Domestically, the major competition is General Electric, Westinghouse, and Honeywell. Internationally, competition includes Siemens and Hitachi. Emerson’s future success requires beating not only the domestic competitors but also the large global Japanese and German manufacturers. Emerson must differentiate itself from the competition using its cost-reduction, quality improvement, and superior marketing and distribution channel strategies.

To attain competitive gain, organisations can differentiate their merchandise and services from their competitors they can also choose to lower their costs in order to compete with other contenders. By aiming their produces to a wide-ranging target, they are essentially covering most of the marketplace or if they choose, they can decide to concentrate on a narrower target within the market (Lynch 2003). While doing so may reduce their market range it essentially reduces their other competitors. Porter stated that there are three generic strategies that an organisation can follow to achieve competitive gain over other organisations. These are:

Competitive strategy is the moves and methods that the firm has taken and is taking to appeal buyers, improve its market position, and to endure competitive pressures. The strategy is about what a firm’s capability to try to knock off competitors and attain competitive advantage, which can be offensive or defensive. There are three approaches to competitive strategy, which are low-cost leadership strategy where struggling to be the overall low-cost manufacturer in the in industry. Moreover, pursuing to distinguish one’s product offering from competitors (differentiation strategy), and the last one is focus or niche strategy where aiming on thin portion of the market rather than the whole market (Porter, 1998).

There are five generic business strategies that companies choose from when trying to successfully compete within their respective industries. This is the first choice a company must make, even before deciding an overall strategy. These generic business strategies include low-cost provider strategy, broad differentiation strategy, best-cost provider strategy; focused strategy based on low costs, and focused strategy based on differentiation. These strategies have many advantages as well as disadvantages. Choosing which one to use depends on what market position a company wants to pursue. Deciding to be more offensive or defensive also plays a role in choosing a

According to Porter, strategies allow organizations to gain competitive advantage from three different bases: cost leadership, differentiation and focus. Porter calls these bases as generic strategies.

Porter’s generic strategies describe how a company attains competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three generic strategies-cost leadership, differentiation and