Google & Motorola - a Horizontal Merger Case

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.

Many companies in the United States are struggling to survive. These companies are experiencing significant decreases in revenue, reduced assets, and increases in liabilities. Companies that already filed, or are at-risk for filing bankruptcy are struggling with keeping up with their competitors, causing the companies to lose their value. When a company files for bankruptcy, the company no longer gets to make the business decisions. The bankruptcy courts begin to make the decisions for the companies in efforts to restore the businesses. If the company is unable to revive itself from bankruptcy status, the company goes out of business. If this occurs, the company must sell everything it owns in order to compensate its shareholders and repay

A structure depends on the organization 's objectives and strategy. In a very centralized structure, the highest layer of management has most of the choice creating power and has tight management over departments and divisions. In a much suburbanized structure, the choice creating power is distributed and also the departments and divisions could have totally different degrees of independence. Wal-mart’s structure is built upon its risk management, safety and claims management process. Google Inc. has gained much attention and acclaim for its unusual organizational culture, which is designed to establish loyalty and creativity. Although both Google and Wal-mart focuses on risk management and they specialized on two different factors. Google focus more on creativity, loyalty and keeping its employees happy. Wal-mart tends to help customers by saving money, claims and promoting within the company.

HTC’s competitive position is not sustainable. In fact, the disappointing financial performance in Q1 2012 and the increasingly decreasing operating margin all points to a slower growth. Besides the statistics, HTC also face several imminent threats, such as the popularity of Samsung and Apple’s smartphone offering, the increase in competitors in the smartphone market, the shift in market, from operator push to brand pull, and the ongoing patent war with Apple. However there are also opportunities HTC can take advantage of to keep its competitive position. The opportunities are presented in the high growth rate of Smartphone Market, 61% in 2011, and the lack of well made Android Tablet.

There are many competing brands of smart phones and Samsung has reported a decline of profits in 2014. Information from GSM arena shows than Samsung released 54 new phone models in 2014 , compared with 24 by HTC , 11 Motorola and 2 by Apple, leading to increased production costs and lack focus on a specific customer segments thereby losing some of its competitive advantage (GSM Arena , 2015).The lack of popularity of its own OS (Tizen ) and dependence on Google’s Android platform makes it vulnerable on google to develop an “ecosystem”. There are component integration issues as well as loss revenue from potential App sales (Strategic Mangement insight , 2015). Negative publicity from litigation due to patents are likely to continue as technology patents are vague and Samsung with is large portfolio is likely to infringe on some of the patents (Tibken, 2014).

On the other hand there are also many other strategies that can achieve profitable growth such as a takeover or a merger. Orange and T-Mobile were two mobile phone companies that had nearly reached the end of their product life cycle in 2008 due to the rising popularity of other networks offering new USP’s such as 3’s unlimited internet and Vodaphones ‘freebees’ perks. However with the equal merger of the two companies in 2010 and performing under the new refurbished name that is EE (everything everywhere), it is now the largest mobile network operator in the UK, with around 28 million customers. The synergy between these two companies has not only increased

SGMT  6050  –  Case  Write-­‐Up   McCaw   Cellular  Communications:  The  AT&T/McCaw  Merger   Negotiation     Armin  Ezatagha     Student  Number  ⏐  205  576  707   eMail  ⏐  aezatagha12@schulich.yorku.ca     Schulich  School  of  Business   Tuesday,  March  05,  2013                                 Current  Telecommunications  Ecosystem     McCaw  Cellular  Communications  (MCC),  although  positioned

In the opinion of Baumol and Blinder (2011, p. 235), "monopolistic competition is a market structure characterized by many small firms selling somewhat different products." The authors in this case further note that the output of each entity is small in comparison to the market's aggregate output of competing but closely related products. With that in mind, the mobile phone market exhibits some key characteristics of monopolistic competition. In this market, customers in need of mobile phones are presented with a wide range of options to choose from. For instance, a customer who enters a mobile phone handset shop has the option of purchasing a Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry or even an LG handset. All these products despite being closely related are also largely differentiated. As Tucker (2010, p. 268) notes, "the key feature of

2000-2006: HTC made first time profits when it engineered and developed PDA for Compaq computer. HTC made an alliance with top hardware companies and became best hardware maker which led to release of the XDA, the first Windows based smartphone by collaborating with Microsoft. HTC operated in ODM business and Mobile operator business. HTC designed customized phones for Mobile operators based on their specifications which led them to gain attractive contracts from different Mobile operators. HTC contracts with mobile operators was reason for HTC’s early success. HTC relationship with Handspring to develop Treo smartphone facilitated the opportunity to learn about software and User-Interface design. By 2006, HTC was shipping more than 70% of the world Windows Mobile smartphones.

It became available on January 5, 2010 and uses the Android open source mobile operating system

In 2014 both Apple and Samsung sold a combined total of about 108.2 million units of their products! Samsung sold about 71 million units while on the other hand Apple sold 94.75 million units. For the past few years, the competing and comparison between Apple and Samsung was at its maximum. Fights started between people to prove an idea about which company is the best but they did not know that they were only comparing their smartphone. That is not the only thing a person should concentrate at while comparing two of the biggest multinationals in the world. People should look at the sales of all of the company’s products, their profits and losses, the history of the company, and the reviews of the people about their

Due to the financial downturn and the emergence of new devices in the global handset

In this following report I will discuss the phone industry and analysed it in great detail. I will analysis the market structure and try and understand why the mobile industry falls to heavily oligopoly structure. I will highlight all the structures, however I will discuss in detail how, for example Vodafone can be incorporated in the porter’s five forces method to show how the mobile industry has devolved over the years and to understand if consumers are driven by the actual technology of the phone but if it driven more by style.

The purposes of this report are to (1) address the problems Sprint and Nextel incurred before the merger, (2) discuss

After researching Motorola one of the most delightful things that I discovered is that the biggest opportunity is their wide range of products that are well placed in the market, when the military has a need Motorola is here, when public safety has a need Motorola is there as well as the general population. Also understanding the fact that they have a very strong promotional strategy, by using different tools they tempt their customers towards an exciting era of innovation. The fact that Motorola has been involved in the venture of