The Business Sector Size Of Equipment

Currently the margins Inventec makes on its Notebook PC’s are low and tough competition is pushing the margins even lower. Inventec’s reliance on HP-Compaq puts the company in danger of going out of business should HP-Compaq suddenly decide to take their business elsewhere. It is imperative that Inventec diversify its products and increase its customer base.

The PC industry was experiencing tremendous cost pressure and was undergoing a period of consolidation. As profit margins fell, PC makers were launching cost reduction strategies aimed at further improving the efficiency of their supply chains, while lowering the cost of distribution. According to a recent newspaper article: The latest financial results for PC makers show a slow down in both sales and profitability. Both corporations and consumers are holding on to their PCs for a longer period of time to avoid the cost and hassles associated with upgrading their equipment. As a result, purchases are being deferred and PC makers are looking at new markets for growth opportunities. The industry appears to be undergoing a wave of consolidation as cost control and scale become more important than ever before.1 In 2007, a major news magazine ran a cover article entitled “Whither the PC?” The threats reported in their analysis were worldwide and stemmed from a variety of factors including the growing popularity of mobile phones, PDAs and web-based application software. For most people, email is the most important application that they use. For a long period of time, sending and receiving email necessitated having a full-fledged PC. Nowadays, though, businesspeople and consumers want to

With respect to exhibit 8 and 9 from the case, we see that since its inception, the sales of Lenovo PC’s are increasing and hence by beefing up its sales and distribution Lenovo can grow its market share. Partnerships with other retailers, distributors and suppliers would help Lenovo to optimize its downstream activities and hence maintain an edge over its competition.

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.

And these analyses will be done with the help of Porter’s 5 forces (see appendix 1, 2, 3). This analysing toll deals with issues which are from outside the industry that impacts the nature of competition within the certain industry. Thurlby, (1998) stated “Understanding the nature of each of these forces gives organisations the necessary insights to enable them to formulate the appropriate strategies to be successful in their market”1. The analysis of the three industry are given belowPC industry (See appendix 1) This competition within the PC industry is extraordinarily high consisting with top companies like Dell, HP, Apple, Gateway and Sony. In order to gain competitive advantage, the key factors are advancement in technology, custom built PCs, reliability and standard customer service. The life cycle of PC industry can be seen as mature (See appendix 6); however the growth of PC’s has not decline. The reason is due to the globalisation trends taking place within the major firms. The barriers very high where there are already five main firms that dominate the market. Therefore, the chances of new PC companies entering the market and get significant hold of market share is very slender. The main two factors that are making the entry level high are mainly cost and distribution and the top five firms also control 70 per cent of the global personal computer market. Another factor may be is that

Hewlett-Packard: Develops, assembles, and sells computer hardware and printers. The firm outsources many of its computer and printer components.

In order to make this concept real, Staples has to build competitive advantage through finding the right management team who are experienced in this area, looking for the right location to open their stores in order to be close to the target customers, deciding on how many staffs needed in a store to be effective, establishing a distribution channel where suppliers will cooperate according to their operations, choosing the selection of the product required and the amount inventory to keep, managing costs and be efficient all the time, and communicating their value to the target customers. A key organizational capability that Staples realizes instantly is to have an information system that can help them to manage the process better in place, which greatly contributes to increase Staples' efficiency. Such system is able to help Staples to get the right merchandise mix in order to be profitable through monitoring customers' needs, and attain low cost structure by making sure that the inventories turnover accordingly. In sum, Staples is successful in building most of its intangible and tangible asset and develop organizational capability

SITUATION: Once the largest computer manufacturer in the world, Dell has slipped to third in line behind Lenovo and HP. With sales of their once famed laptops and PCs quickly declining, their market share has taken a hit as a result. Lenovo and HP are not only to blame for Dell’s demise, Apple and Google have established new markets for smartphones and tablets that has shifted demand to these new toys away from laptops/PCs. These new disruptive technologies are a cheaper and thus more accessible substitute to the old guard (laptops and PCs).

Computer technology is constantly advancing over software and hardware that is available at any one given time. These constant changes affect how long computer products can sell for a premium price but also can make it cheaper for those consumers that are not interested in the newest and latest components. Personal computers (PC), also known as desktop computers, are common place in jobs, schools and homes. The demand for personal computers is constant and revolving since components of computers gets better and more powerful with time. The target market then becomes anyone that uses a personal computer for home or work. HP uses the fact that computers are a common item in any office or home to their advantage and offers not only PC’s but other accessories pertaining to computers as well. While HP currently excels at providing a product for a decent price they are missing out on consumers that Equalus will focus

In 2010 the total shipments of PC market reached 13.06 million units, an increase of 10.7% over 2009. View on the industrial chain, the basic pattern of PC products industry chain did not change throughout 2010. The whole industry chain of living was still the most dominant upstream chip and operating system. However, in these two markets, Intel and Microsoft are challenged with AMD and LINUX. Harvard business school case study—Taking Dell Private P1-2

Computers R’Us is facing the strong competition from the industry players and within the changing business environment, it is important to conduct the required research to identify the emerging trends from the marketplace. This report looks into the different options of available market information facing by Computers R’Us.

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.

Changing Market Conditions In the early 1990's, while technological innovation continued to drive the company's success, many business units were being forced to compete on other dimensions. In consumer product lines, low prices, broad availability and ease of use had become competitive requirements. Lew Platt, HP's current President and Chief Executive Officer, once acknowledged the importance of improving customer service and responsiveness, We're not doing as good a job in order fulfillment as we need to. In fact, it's where we get our lowest marks from customers. We have to be a lot easier to do business with. Improvement in order fulfillment will strengthen HP's competitiveness, increase customer satisfaction and reduce expenses, so this is an

As indicated in the table above, Dell and HP are the strongest players in the computer industry. These results are also supported by the market share statistics presented in case Exhibit 3. Conversely, the table above indicates Acer as the industry’s weakest rival in part because it focuses on producing low priced computers,

MICROSOFT (windows server) 2. INTEL ( cutting-edge technology) 3. SAP ( IT infrastructure) 4. VMWaRE ( virtual infrastructure solutions) 5. ORACLE ( database solutions) 6. BMC (data centre automation.) 7. BROCADE ( networking solutions) Cost structure36 1. Cost of Revenue $48260m 2. Sales & Admin expense $7664m 3. R&D Expense $856m 4. Capital Expenditure $675m 5. Total Acquisition $2562m 6. Total Operating expense $57640m 7. Software&network 33 %&39% increase Revenue streams21 Key resources35 1. Acquisition 2. Brand equity 3. Long ability (as high per company) 4. Intellectual property 5. R&D and revenue stream 6. Human resource 7. Core competence Key activity37 1. Support & deployment Services 2. Cloud & security services 3. Software & peripherals ( Printer, TV, networking, wear less product, anti-virus) 4. Client product (PC, Monitor, note book, work station, tablet, Smart phone) 5. Developing technologies ( in 2011 its open the dell silicon valley research and development centre ) Value proposition 1. Dell customization 2. Direct sell approach 3. Product configuration 4. Pre & post sell customer