Porter’s Five Forces of Industry Attractiveness Essay

Porter’s Five Forces (1980), named after Michael E. Porter, is a critical framework to access the level of risk and degree of potential profitability of each industry in which firms are competing. Specifically, five forces are shown in Figure 1, are includes competition between rivalry, potential of new entrant, threat of substitute products, and pressure on bargaining power of suppliers and customers.

The airline industry is a hyper-competitive marketplace as many airlines have gone out of business

The Airline industry is a large and constantly growing industry. It facilitates economic growth, international investment and world trade and is therefore central to other industries as well for globalisation. There are various forces which lead to globalisation in airline industry. Key drivers of change are forces likely to affect the structure of an industry; sector or market. (1).

The airline industry has been a major factor in the globalization of the world economy. It connects the sellers and the buyers as well as transports goods across countries. It also breaks the time and distance barriers. In the past, air travel was considered a luxury but it is now a common necessity.

Overall, the five forces model suggests that the overall intensity of competition in the airline industry is likely to be severe. Back in the early 1980 's competition was very intense. During the late 1980 's the monopolization of major routes by a few major carriers, the limited availability of free landing spots at major hubs and the emergence of limited brand loyalty and tacit price agreements have all helped reduce the intensity of competition. However, as already mentioned, slumping demand in the early 1990 's plunged the industry once more into a severe price war. Airline travel is a commodity-type product, with limited potential for differentiation.

Competitive rivalry: Airline industry can be characterized as imperfect oligopoly. There are several big airlines that dominate in long-distance flights and several smaller airlines compete for short-distance flights. The competition and price sensitive buyers lower the returns airlines receive. This market situation is favorable for a company like JetBlue, which differentiated itself by comfort at low price, but this can be easily duplicated by other companies.

Other factors contributing to rivalry include enormous fixed costs, excess capacity, low differentiation, price wars. And the exit barrier for airline industry is also very high.

Whenever new firms can easily enter a particular industry, the intensity of competitiveness among firms increases (David, 2013). Competition in the airline industry is intense because of barriers to entry being low (Cederholm, 2014). According to Cederholm, about 1,300 new airlines were established in the last 40 years (2014).

American airline industry is steadily growing at an extremely strong rate. This growth comes with a number economic and social advantage. This contributes a great deal to the international inventory. The US airline industry is a major economic aspect in both the outcome on other related industries like tourism and manufacturing of aircraft and its own terms of operation. The airline industry is receiving massive media attention unlike other industries through participating and making of government policies. As Hoffman and Bateson (2011) show the major competitors include Southwest Airlines, Delta Airline, and United Airline.

* Government. The government is a weakness if they change or update some of the regulations that are in place now. This could cause delays and plans to change and take more time between flights.

Particularly when new entrants are diversifying from other markets, they can leverage existing capabilities and cash flows to shake up competition like Apple did when it entered the music distribution business. The threat of new entry therefore, puts a cap on the profit potential of an industry. The threat to Air Asia is relatively less as the capital required to enter the industry is quite high. However, potential new entrants from full service carriers with a surplus capital could be threats in the future and long-term.

In his article “The five competitive forces that shape strategy“, Michael Porter (2008) updates and extends his “five forces” framework he first introduced in 1979 and which has influenced the academic and business research for decades. He reaffirms that “THREAT OF ENTRY”, “THE POWER OF SUPPLIERS”, “THE POWER OF BUYERS”, THE THREAT OF SUBSTITUTES”, and “RIVALRY AMONG EXISTING COMPETITORS” are the forces that shape every single industry, and a thorough understanding of such forces help analyze everything from the intensity of competition to the profitability and attractiveness of any industry. The framework has two dimensions; the vertical dimension that connects

The airline industry has always been a fiercely competitive sector. Since the invention of low-cost carriers, also known as no-frills or

One of the world’s most competitive and prominent industries is the airlines industry. It generates huge amounts of income as well as employment each year. Some of the common names in US air travel service providers are Alaska, Northwest, Southwest, US airways, American etc.

Porter’s Five Forces model is used to evaluate the degree of rivalry between competitors in a given industry through assessing the four forces that lead to this outcome. These forces are the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, and the threat of substitute products.