Target Corporation Business Analysis

Target Corporation is an evolving company. Target has great expectations for its future. For the year 2015, Target aims to expand its experience in order to effectively alter their customer’s expectations and shopping behavior. Target’s industry outlook starts with opening fifteen new stores for the year. The strategic store growth plans focus on localization and customer experience. Target will establish new store formats such as TargetExpress and CityTarget, while also offering new experiences, merchandising layouts and innovations in its general merchandising stores. (Target.com) The retailer’s TargetExpress is the smallest store format at approximately 20,000 square feet and aims to provide customers with effective quick trip shopping experience.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Target’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This paper will also talk about how Porter’s Five affects Target’s business decisions.

Even though Target is ranked currently 36 in the fortune 500 companies and have over 1750 stores, they are still very susceptible to being a victim of a cyber attack. In 2013 Target fell victim to a security breach on their system. Roughly around Thanksgiving of 2013 someone had installed malware in Target’s security and payment system enabling the hackers to steal credit card and personal information. “Six months earlier the company began installing a $1.6 million malware detection tool made by the computer security firm FireEye, whose customers also include the CIA and the Pentagon.” (BloombergBusiness) In place was a very effective security system, but when the attacked happen on November 30, FireEye spotted the hackers and Bangalore, a third party cyber security company hired by Target alerted the IT team at corporate office in Minneapolis. There was no response from Target’s Corporate IT team and therefore led to the 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers

The aim of this paper is to highlight the strategic position of the company with an overview of its internal and external environment. The study of its strategy, design and other forces, one can easily gauge why and how target has managed to become the retail giant it is today.

Target Corporation is known worldwide as a large retail chain that brings in millions of dollars each fiscal year. The ability to remain competitive in a saturated industry could prove difficult to some retailers, but Target remains one of the leaders in the retail market. With success comes risk. Target Corporation competes against online retailers as well as “big box” stores to remain competitive.

Target faces a major problem that many other organizations are facing, keeping consumer information private. Protecting consumer information is becoming more complicated due to the increase of technology available to those looking to steal their information. In order to create a solution to this problem an organizational development intervention would need to occur at a team level. The team level is the most appropriate level due to the fact that for a major technological change to occur across the whole organization it would involve analysis of the team not one individual (South University Online, 2015, para. 2). A technology breach would

This paper discusses the company history of Target, evaluates Target’s internal strengths and weaknesses, and discusses external opportunities and threats. Additionally, the authors examine how the company functions to provide product to customers, and also elaborates on how the company interacts with their customers. Lastly, the authors evaluate the needs that Target serves its customers and assesses the criticality of the products provided.

This report examines Target Corporation’s performance in a detailed strategic audit. The audit includes an external, internal and strategic analysis as well as a recommended course of action. The findings of the audit recommend a robust on-line/mobile presence to complement in-store sales, and to increase future earnings to remain competitive by building upon physical assets, brand value and logistical capabilities.

Target a large retail corporation that operates over 1,700 stores across the United States. They also operate as an online retailer at target.com. In 2012 the retailer earned more than $73 billion dollars in revenue and grew their sales by 5.1% from the previous year. Looking at the revenue and sales growth rate it is hard to fathom that more money could not be spent to ensure that consumer data is protected as much as possible. As information security specialists one of the worst things that can happen is our network gets infiltrated and customer information is stolen. On December 19, 2013 Target released a statement stating that they have had an information

In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many

Target inappropriately handled this crisis because the company waited to report the data breach until days after it initially learned about it, which gave the public the impression that Target was being dishonest. On December 15th, 2013 Target initially learned of the breach in security, and on December 19th Target confirmed the data breach to the public. In Target’s initial statement, it claimed “There is no indication that PIN numbers have been compromised on affected bank issued PIN debit cards or Target debit cards” (Steinhafel, 2013). On December 27th, Target retracted its statement, and stated, “our ongoing investigation determined that strongly encrypted PIN data was removed from our system during the data breach incident” (Target,

Due to Targets actions they showed that they lacked dignity and integrity in exchange for an increase in their revenues. The stakeholders involved include the company Target and their customers. The employees of the company made certain decisions to increase the amount of money that individuals in the community will use at their stores. According to the article, this is done by secretly collecting personal information about their customers.

This section primarily attempts to provide a better understanding as to how the data breach impacted the results reported in Target’s financial statements. Because the breach occurred within Target’s fourth quarter 2013 period—between November 2, 2013, and February 1, 2014—financial analysis was gathered from information provided in Target’s 2013 quarterly reports, 2012 and 2013 annual report. This analysis will be divided into four parts. The first is an analysis of the company’s quarterly revenues and net earnings and how it measures year-over-year. The second relates to the costs associated with the data breach. The third assesses the company’s profitability through ratio analysis. The final segments gauge Target’s 2013 fiscal year performance with that of its biggest competitor, Walmart.

Target can be regarded as the store which has emerged after a century of operation and ranks as the second largest store in family of hundreds of stores working in US currently. People have to make access of this web store to get their use and advantage they prefer to get access with and intend to buy form it as they plan to in their shopping experience.

On December 19th, Target’s website and telephone lines were flooded with an increase in traffic of worried customers. Potential victims said they had trouble getting a hold of Target through its website and call centers (D’Innocenzio, 2013). Disgruntled customers took to social media in the forms of Twitter and Facebook to voice their opinion and look for answers. Some of the comments from disgruntled customers said they would stop shopping at target. Forbes Magazine even called the data breach the “nightmare before Christmas” (McGrath, 2014). Target responded by releasing a statement that said they were working hard to resolve the issues and were going to be hiring more workers to take calls and work out the problems with the website