Porter's Five Forces

The intensity of rivalry, which is the most obvious of the five forces in an industry, helps determine the extent to which the value created by an industry will be dissipated through head-to-head competition. The most valuable contribution of Porter's “five forces” framework in this issue may be its suggestion that rivalry, while important, is only one of several forces that determine industry attractiveness.

The first of Porter’s Five Forces is the threat of new entrants. According to the case study, there has been a wave of new entrants to the retail industry. These include Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, Old Navy and the recently irrelevant, Target Canada. The second force, the threat of substitute products or services, is also prevalent in the retail market. Inevitably, the target audience that the Hudson’s Bay Company is trying to cater to, will shop at other retail stores for the same goods due to consumers behaviours and preferences. Another impacting force is the bargaining power of suppliers. However, this force does not play as large of an impact to HBC as one might initially assume. Traditionally, HBC among other large retail stores makes a large percentage of their

Power of Suppliers - This is how much pressure suppliers can place on a business. If one supplier has a large enough impact to affect a company's margins and volumes, then it holds substantial power. Here are a few reasons that suppliers might have power:

· The knowledge of the nature of the elasticity of demand for products will help a business to decide whether to cut prices in a particular case.

Porter’s Five Forces is defined as threats of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, power of buyers, the threat of substitutes and rivalry among existing competitors. New entrants into the industry aim to gain market share from rivals, so the intensity of competition may require to make changes on current strategy of marketing to maintain existing market share. The bargaining

The term 'suppliers' comprises all sources for inputs that are needed in order to provide goods or services. If there is a market with much choice supplier choice, bargaining power will be less.

Suppliers pose a credible threat of forward integration. Low -Medium. Its is possible of suppliers to integrate forward but there is no such mention in the case.

5) The bargaining power of suppliers: The cost of factors of production (e.g. labor, raw materials, components, and services such as expertise) provided by suppliers can have a significant impact on a company's profitability. As such suppliers may refuse to work with the firm or charge excessively high prices for unique resources.

Defining an industry can be described as drawing a line between the established competitor and the substitute products offered by competitors outside the industry (Porter 1998). “Porter’s five forces provide a framework for an industry and business strategy development to drive the five forces that determine the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market. The Porter’s Five Forces model helps identify where improvement can be made regarding competitive forces, threat of potential entrants, bargaining power of buyers, and bargaining power of suppliers and threats of substitute products.

According to Porter’s competitive forces model, exist five major forces, which managers should analyze, and strategies developed for the company to increase their competitive edge. They are the threat of entry of new competitors and of substitute products or services, the bargaining power of suppliers and customers (buyers), and the rivalry among existing firms in the industry.

As we begin to strategically plan for our business, it is important for us to take a deep dive into our competitive environment to understand where we are strong competitively and where we are weak competitively. An analysis of the forces driving industry competition using M.E. Porter’s Five Forces Model will assist us in determining where the power lies in a business situation as we begin to plan. We must understand how they work in our industry and how they affect our particular situation. Whatever the collective strength of these forces is, our job as the strategists of the organization is to

Existing Competitors. Rivalry among competitors within an industry use price discounting, new products, marketing, and other techniques to be competitive. Profitability of an industry suffers from high rivalry. The intensity with which companies compete and the basis on which they compete determine to which degree rivalry brings down an industry’s profitability (Porter, 2008). Pure competition is considered by economists as a competition with a high

According to Michael Porter, “Every industry has an underlying structure, or a set of fundamental economic and technical characteristics, that give rise to these competitive forces” (Porter 1998:23). The forces mentioned above are: industry rivalry, threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products, bargaining power of suppliers and bargaining power of buyers. Additionally, Porter mentioned that: “Knowledge of these underlying sources of competitive pressure provides the groundwork for a strategic agenda or action” (Porter 1998:22).

51]. The model suggests a successful businesses strategy to wart-off competition by careful application of an “environmental analysis”. The Porter model proposes five elemental strategic defenses against five potential forces: threat of new entrants, rivalry among competitive firms, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, and the threat of substitution products.

The bargaining power of buyers is affected by the concentration and number of consumers, when buyer power is strong, they gain the power to choose between producers and ultimately equip themselves with bargaining power which then the producers will have to conform to in order to produce profit, under these conditions the buyer has the most influence in determining the price of products. Also when buyers have strong bargaining power in the exchange relationship, competition can be affected in several ways. Powerful buyers can bargain for lower prices, better