Intel Strategy Analysis

Intel operates in an industry, which is comprised of products involving high research and development costs, continuous product improvement and new innovations. The companies in the industry are having high economies of scale and are knowledge based. It helps both the service and manufacturing sectors in the growth process. Intel is positioned as a leading company with its ability to adapt to technological changes and its strong relations with other businesses who are major buyers of integrated circuits. The industry in which it operates is very competitive and comes with high risks as

1. What are the lessons useful for their future microprocessor business that you think Intel should have taken away from their experience in the DRAM industry?

d) (2 pts.) Why do we see that the strategy that results is not the strategy that offers both players the best financial

For years, AMD held the place of a distant follower of the large microprocessor market leader, Intel. Up to there, the competitor Intel led the market (with a “push” strategy) by creating consumer needs thanks to technological innovations. Those were linked with strong marketing campaign in order to facilitate a quicker adoption process of their new product line. However, in 2003, AMD change its traditional strategy to use a widely different one by switching into a blue ocean strategy. Indeed, AMD has changed course to become a “starter” firm. AMD has decided to launch at first its own brand server microprocessor range, called “Opteron” before one of Intel. At this moment, the firm made the decision to initiate the moves of server segment and therefore take heavier risks in term of investments, sales, pushing partners

In one and half month the single word of one mathematician has turned into a worldwide campaign against us. AMD, Cyrix, and Nexgen are benefiting most from these events. They proved to have become quicker in manufacturing clones of our innovative products. Given this shorter time to market, they may jump on this opportunity to deliver Pentium clones any time. Our strategy to stop competitors copying our new products was heavy patent protection for the Pentium brand, however if our brand image is continually damaged to such extent, that protection would not give us the competitive advantage we expected. Although we have been the chips of choice for most of users, with the current negative publicity, the competitors may find their niche and expand their market share. Cost of switching from one type of processor to another (for example from Intel to AMD) is not significant for computer manufacturers due to the modular nature of this product. We know that this flaw would not affect any significant portion of the personal users (about 3.7 millions chips sold). The business users with heavy calculation needs such as engineering and specifically financial sectors would

3. In what ways are the events described at Intel and eBay similar and in what ways are they different (4 marks)?

With Intel have very few substitutes in the microprocessor industry, it is it is most certain that current customers will not want to switch and use another company’s products. High switching cost presents low bargaining power to the customers mainly because it would be very expensive to switch to a competitor, and since Intel is the leader in the market, switching

Strategies of our firm In oligopoly market, one important method to increase the market share is to keep the price lower than competitors price. However, because at the beginning of the game, our firm ignored the importance of the plant size, process improvement and the training, our production cost was higher than other firms. So we could not use the

The large capital requirements to enter the computer industry combined with established brand identities of the current incumbents make barriers to entry high, not to mention the economies of scale and distribution channels that incumbents enjoy which make entry barriers even higher. The current PC incumbents enjoy demand-side benefit of scale in the business sector where PC buyers prefer to buy products from large trusted companies, raising the level of entry barriers.

In your judgment is Intel a “monopoly”? Did Intel use monopoly-like power, in other words, did Intel achieve its objectives by relying on power that it had due to its control of a large portion of the market? Explain your answers.

Since 1998, Intel has developed and used an e-business strategy to maintain relationships with its customers, employees and suppliers. The company's goal is to become a 100% ‘e-business enabled' corporation. In terms of the value chain concept, Intel has reaped tangible benefits in the volume of business it does on the Web, as well as created savings of time and money for both itself and its customers.

Competitors might face increasing costs when firms deliberately increase the price of supplies or when competitors are forced to bid for remaining inputs. However, this does not mean it will increase competitor’s cost if supplies are available from alternative suppliers.

Intel excels at top-down innovation, where highly differentiated components and electronics command a high gross margin relative to competitors, enabling faster design wins with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and development partners. This top-down innovation flow within Intel is so dominant, that the product design teams are significantly more productive than even the most advanced business process management teams (Segerstrom, 2007). Microprocessors and the follow-on Internet, networking, security and integrated motherboard products are all predicated on this top-down innovation cycle that leads to product line proliferation in Intel (Zimmerman, 2010). DRAMS were undifferentiated in structure, lacked industry standards that could create differentiated performance or compatibility based on adherence or alignment to standards or customer requirements (Nicholson, 1997). Intel chose to compete on the only other area of their core strength as a company, which is quality management and yield levels (Clark, Walz, Turner, Miszuk, 1993). Getting the yields for DRAMS to 60%, which for a brief period of time lead the global industry, only served to accelerate a very high level of commoditization in the industry (Voss, 1998).

Both Dell and HP are two strong players in PC industry which refers to an industry where companies produces PCs (desktops and notebooks), handheld devices (smart phones and tablets), and workstations. However, with growing global expansion, Dell and HP’s performance differs. Dell, once the world’s largest PC maker in 2001, has continually lost its market share to HP and Acer since 2007 (Guglielmo 2009). The cause is rooted in two differences of these companies: company diversifications and core competences. Therefore, how firms can continually survive in the PC business is more of an issue for Dell than for HP.

Intel changed marketing history by achieving to publicize an inner piece of a product that could not be seen from the outside. By placing tags on products, they could display their company logo and the model of the product inside the computer, thus making publicity to an ‘ingredient’ inside the whole. In those initial marketing campaigns Intel well-known themselves from the competition by labelling their products with names instead of only number; this helped them gain reputation surrounded by the customers.