Starbucks : Introduction And Problem Identification

Thesis: While Starbucks has been an industry leader in the specialty coffee market, rapid overexpansion and current economic conditions have caused it to lose its market dominance. Is the company strong enough to recover?

As the world’s number one specialty coffee retailer, Starbucks sells coffee drinks, food items, coffee beans, and coffee-related accessories and equipment. In addition, Starbucks sells whole-bean coffees through a specialty sales group and grocery stores. Starbucks has grown beyond coffee into related businesses such as coffee-flavoured ice cream and ready-to-drink coffee beverages. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Starbucks business strategy, customer value proposition, company’s operations and the risks to financial results and reporting in the short term.

Within the coffee industry Starbucks Corporations has grown from a small shop to a leading coffee distributor, proving to have financial strength and determination to continue growth. With the weakening economy the continued success of Starbucks

Starbucks is dominant coffee brand in North America, which also is well-known worldwide. Established in 1971 as coffee shop oriented to a niche of coffee purists, in late 1980’s it turned to be a constantly growing chain of stores that sold whole-beans and premium-priced coffee to mostly affluent, well-educated customers. In years 1992-2002 company was showing at least 5% annual growth. And by 2002 Starbucks was serving already 20M customers in 5886 stores (both operated and licensed) around the globe, had $3.3 billion net revenues and was opening 3 new stores a day in average.

Since Starbucks entered the coffee retail business, the company has made many trade-off business decisions. The first major trade-off was made when Howard Schultz wanted to acquire present day Starbucks from three entrepreneurs Baldwin, Siegel and Bowker. Therefore, Schultz prior to the acquisition made the trade-off to open his own coffee bar in 1986 instead of staying at Starbucks as the manager of retail sales and marketing. A bold feat, Schultz was able to replicate success and was offered to buy Starbucks for $4 million. At the time of the acquisition, many investors, including the former Starbucks owners, would not expect that the American consumer would pay a premium for coffee products. Schultz, after calculating the opportunity cost, was convinced that Starbucks would become a large coffee chain not only in the United States but internationally too. Reflecting this approach, Schultz’s trade-off worked. Starbucks, according to our book has revenue exceeding $13 billion and nearly 200,000 employees. The company has also expanded to 40 countries with 17,000 stores (Hill et al., 2015).

Starbucks financial statements were analyzed for the fiscal year ended September 27, 2015. Like all public companies, annual and quarterly financial statements are required to allow regulators and other interested parties to analyze the financial status and management decision making of the company. This analysis focuses on the results of Starbucks most recent published annual report containing their balance sheets, statement of earnings and cash flows. These statements will be analyzed against the results of one of its competitors, Dunkin Donuts, to investigate how the two companies compare to each other. It was noted that Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts do not have corresponding fiscal year ends. The data therefore is not directly comparable since the reports do not reflect the same time period of data but should provide additional insight. The paper will attempt to provide a brief analysis of Starbucks operations in terms of its liquidity, leverage, activity, profitability and growth ratios used by analysts in the industry.

Abstract After decades of grande growth based on the Starbucks experience, Starbucks Coffee Company experienced continuous drop of stock price since the beginning of 2007. Upon first glance of their financial statements, there was 20% increase in revenues and 9% increase in net income last year. Such growth could be counter

This Module 1 SLP will be the first part of an in-depth market analysis. The company I have chosen is Starbucks Coffee Company. The first Starbucks opened in 1971 at Pike Place market in Seattle, WA. Eleven years later, Howard Schultz was hired by the company to be the director of retail operations and marketing. The first Starbucks with the current coffee house look and feel was opened in 1984 in downtown Seattle. The Starbucks headquarters is still located in Seattle, WA. Currently, Starbucks is relying on retail expansion, product innovation, and service innovation to achieve this long-term goal once set by current chairman Howard Schultz: “The idea was to create a chain of coffeehouses

Starbucks is known for their Frappuccino’s; unfortunately they are on a downward spiral in sales due to competitors such as McDonalds. In 2008 Starbucks admits to its losses due to their competitors. “Company executives now freely admit that such thinking is largely to blame for the woes that led to Tuesday’s announcement that Starbucks will close 600 U.S. stores and eliminate thousands of jobs. The coffee giant’s missteps have come at a spectacularly bad time, hitting as the economic slump deepens and consumers are seeing their discretionary spending eaten up by rising gas prices and grocery bills (Linn).”

The purpose of this analysis is to evaluate the Industry’s features and the company’s strategy. The main analysis in this project is external analysis and internal analysis. External analysis is contain of strategy group, five forces, partial SWOT, PESTEL, Industry life cycle and Internal analysis is contain of market segmentation, CSFS, partial SWOT, generic strategy, Resources and Core competency, the Boston matrix, the Ansoff matrix and financial analysis. At last the recommendation part will indicate the company’s future prospects.

The company founded Starbucks has experienced rapid growth since its first store opened in Seattle in March 1971. The impressive expansion over recent years has left it penetrate within the market of the top 100 best global brands of 2012, according to Interbred, and also it has been considered by Fortune magazine as one of the 500 largest companies in the world. Starbucks is now the largest coffee retailer in the world.

Starbucks’ shares have grown more than 1500% over the past decade. Financially, it has been an oak tree in an ever changing economy with customers that have ever changing demands. However, there has been increased concern for the financial viability of the coffee shop a recently announced plan to close down over 600 stores that were said to be underperforming domestically. That means that more than 1,000 jobs will be eliminated. As scary as that is on the local front to top management, the executive staff feels that it is the only way to recover from it’s shocking $108.7M loss for the 2nd quarter this fiscal year.

Cognition gives the companies information on how consumers respond to different marketing stimuli they face for the products used. It has to do with customer’s thinking and how do they behave toward a particular product. To be more specific and also reading the book “cognition refers to the mental structures and processes involved in thinking, understanding, and interpreting stimuli and events.” (Peter & Olson, pg. 21)

Howard Schultz didn’t just build a company, he built an empire. Starbucks’ Coffee is a benchmark in the coffee trade, for coffee drinkers and, even non-coffee drinkers. He nursed a small company in the big city of Seattle, to a global

The context change in form that Starbucks found itself competing with smaller chains that resembled its former pre-expansion model with competitors focusing in creating symbolic-expressive value and fast food restaurants that had started to offer specialty coffee with more aggressive advertisement at a lower cost. The competitive context changed for Starbucks because it’s focus in mass distribution channels and its retail footprint strategy stated its product within a standard performance product value; this affected the value perception of the product.