The Industry Environment : Walmart 's Competitiveness

The case is about Loblaw companies Inc., a highly successful grocery chain in Canada. Loblaw is Canada’s largest food distributor. The major issue is the emergence of Wal-Mart, who is looking to pursue expanding their grocery line chain in the Canadian market. According to Yunna (2014), porter’s five forces model has been widely applied to analyze industry competition in various markets. Using Porter’s 5 Forces to analysis the issues of the case can be a useful tool in summarizing the attractiveness of the market or industry. According to Dobbs (2012), the five forces are the threats posed by competitive rivalry, powerful buyers, powerful suppliers, potential new entrants, and substitute products. The analysis of Porter’s five forces framework can be viewed in figure 1. The case describes the retailer-supplier relationships as power plays. As the scale would tilt in favor of the one wielding the most clout at a point in time. There are numerous manufacturers with various substitutions among the grocery store. However, a supermarket would lease out shelf space for rent. The manufacturers would pay the grocery store a combination of different allowance to obtain secure shelf and warehouse positions for its products. Ultimately the category manager had the final word, which left the manufacturers with little to no bargaining power.

Competitive environments are defined by the identity, track record, financial strength and market share of key competitors. Harvard Professor Michael Porter 's Five Forces model can be used to evaluate a company 's competitive position. These five forces are barriers to entry (the ability of new players to enter the market), buyer power (the ability of customers to influence price),

Threat of new entrants: Retail industry has a higher barrier to entry. First, it is difficult to work out a good value chain as it involves a complex process. Second, it is difficult for new entrants to gain competitive advantage and earn above-average returns in such a highly competitive market. Besides,

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

The evolution of Wal-mart from the early 1960s to the present day has set a benchmark that few can achieve. Wal-mart executives have been successful nationally as well as globally. The knowledge and expertise in economics have made Wal-mart a global giant. The research completed is the final recommendations by the members of research team C and will address questions regarding global competition and issues of the organizations ability to expand or reduce current operations.

The competition has been analyzed by using Porter’s Five Forces Model. By gathering an analysis of the threats that can come from competitive rivalry, potential new entrants, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and substitutes, Company G can be better compared to its competitors.

The industry does not possess major threat from new entrants due to strong barriers to entry and strong competition for retail space. There is also a strong rivalry between competitors as limited space is being contested by major players alongside

In business, three major strategies comprising of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies exist. The focus strategy emphasizes on providing services and products to a specified buyer group or market segment within a given geographic market. The differentiation approach is often defined as provision of services or products that are perceived to be unique in the market place. Wal-Mart emphasizes on the long-term strategy of cost leadership. Through this strategy, the company ensures that it offers customers with quality products at relatively lower prices than other providers in the industry. Through overall cost leadership strategy, Wal-Mart has been offering better quality products at a lower price than any competitor can offer. For the organization to achieve this goal, it has developed long-term supply chain management, which ensures that products are made available to the market at the required time (Enz, 2010).

The development of the Internet and more specifically the business website has seen brand recognition by consumers escalate to never before seen heights. Because of this brand recognition, it has become important for businesses to design their websites to reflect their overall marketing strategies. This is especially important in the retail world. All retail businesses have a similar overall marketing strategy of generating sales and retaining the customer for future sales. Most of the retail giants still greatly rely on the success of their brick and mortar stores to turn a profit. However, internet sales for these brick and mortar stores have increasingly risen over the last few years to compete with the retail stores like Amazon that are strictly internet based businesses. Brick and mortar retail stores, such as Walmart, Target, Kmart, and Nordstrom, have each designed their websites to reflect the overall retail marketing strategy as well as the individual marketing strategies that have made their brick and mortar businesses successful.

Wal-Mart is a company that has taken its core competencies, which are the capabilities the firm emphasizes and performs especially well while pursuing its vision (Ireland, Hoskisson, Hitt, 2008), and turned them into competitive advantages. Core competencies must satisfy four characteristics in order to be a competitive advantage. These advantages, according to our text, include: *valuable, *rare, *difficult to imitate,*nonsubstitutable.

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. helps individuals around the globe spare cash and live better - at whatever time and anyplace - in retail locations, online and through their cell phones. Every week, more than 245 million clients and individuals visit our almost 11,000 stores under 65 flags in 28 nations and e-trade sites in 11 nations. With financial year 2015 net offers of $482.2 billion, Wal-Mart utilizes 2.2 million partners around the world. (Wal-Mart Corporate) Wal-Mart is a superpower in the business world and has been that way for 50+ years. Understanding how it got to this point and how it has maintained its successful business model starts with its

I would argue that this is the largest current threat facing the company with businesses such as Amazon and Costco in the same market knocking on their door. Walmart just recently hired another CEO, the 3rd such move that I could find in my research for this case study and while replacing a veteran executive with an up-and-coming high performer has all the makings of a strategic shift, early indications suggest that the retail giant will be staying the course with McMillon at the helm. McMillon's decades of employment, deep institutional knowledge, and company loyalty have been credited as key reasons he beat out Bill Simon, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., an executive seen as more of an outsider for the top job. (Pelletier, 2013) Being a friend of the Walton’s, with deep Arkansas roots, and decades of experience doing things the Walmart way is not the hallmark of an incoming CEO who is going to shake things up at the world's largest retailer and America's largest employer. But, given the many challenges the company faces, change might be exactly what is needed. (Pelletier, 2013) The article goes on to talk about a disappointing third quarter when its largest revenue generator, sales from U.S. stores, dropped 0.3%. The company also has forecasted flat earnings during the critically important holiday season. Walmart still expects to see modest sales growth in FY2015 through the opening of smaller, more targeted stores, and its longtime strategy

The threat of substitutes: where it refers to substitute product as those that are available in other industry which can also fulfil the need and want of the consumers. It can affect competition in an industry by placing an invisible ceiling on prices which companies within the industry can charge, due to the fact that if the cost of substitute is low then the consumers will tend to purchase substitutes, therefore limiting the prices that a company can place on certain items to gain maximum profit. For example, lemonade can be substituted for a soft drink. Generally, competitive pressures arising from substitute products increase as the relative price of substitute products declines and as consumer 's switching costs decrease.

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.