What are the strategies of Apple Incorporated Essay

What are the strategies of Apple Incorporated - Essay Example Center of discussion in this paper is Apple as a very unique company because it dominated a market segment which is not its core business. Apple was launched in 1976 in a garage with Steve Wozniak and was able to revolutionize the computing industry with the introduction of its product line Macintosh (Mac) that â€Å"dramatically changed personal computing through its user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), which allowed users to interact with screen images rather than merely typing text commands†. Apple’s success is not solely attributed to the creativity and functionality of its product line but also to its pricing strategy which has been a big change from the 1990s when consumers regarded Apple as a producer of overpriced tech baubles that cannot effectively compete against the far cheaper Windows PCs. This change was a result of a succesful implementation of its value chain activities that has significantly lowered its price. It became very pronounced with the launching of Ipad which price was far lower than what they expected. Its introductory price last year of $499 stunned everyone, which led John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College to comment â€Å"It was a very competitively priced device†. The same is true in the notebook product line. When Macbook Air was introduced in 2008, it was priced at an exorbitant $1,799. This became possible by the briliant management of Apple’s supply chain due to capitalizing its organizational capability of having huge cash reserves. It made its supply chain a strategic weapon to lower price in order to capture the market. It tapped into its huge war chest of $82 billion in cash and marketable securities to lock up supplies of parts for years to enable it push down cost by the scale of its purchase (Wingfield, 2011). It also bought manufacturing capacity ahead of its time and made its components scarce that, in turn, made its competitors scrambling for any parts that are left and drove the cost of its products up while Apple had lowered its own (Wingfield, 2011). To date, Apple has been recorded as the biggest buyer of flash memory chips in the world according to the research firm iSuppli (Wingfield, 2011). The effect of using value chain management as a strategic weapon proved to be a nemesis among its competitors. When this effective value chain management was reflected in retail prices, competitors had to slash their prices where Motorola’s Xoom tablet was pushed to lower its price at $379 at Best Buy (for a limited time) and virtually won the competition with Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad line of tablets which were pushed to be sold at $99 to clean the inventories. III. What is the core of Apple from a product point of view? The core product of Apple was its desktop computer Macintosh. Its main revenue source however comes from its other product line such as Ipad, Iphone and Ipod. IV. Are all products and servic es equal to Apple? If not what are the key pieces? Use your entire toolkit, especially the financials, to support your decision.   Apple Incorporated made itself distinct by making its hardware and software work in synergy that enabled its products and services unequalled by its competitors. The best example that we can show for this is the synergy that its operating system iOS5 that provide synergy among the different product lines of Apple. It powers the iPad, iPod and iPod touch which allows the three products to interact and complement each other. Its new computer operating system Lion also has an Air-drop feature that has made sharing of information between Mac computers very convenient. Air-drops peer

Issues that might affect the success and survival of SKF Essay

Issues that might affect the success and survival of SKF - Essay Example The bearings are used to reduce friction between moving parts of a motor, engine or a wheel. SKF operates across the globe in 70 countries with 110 manufacturing sites. It deals with a wide range of industries such as pulp and paper machinery, steel industry, construction equipment, medical instruments, food and home appliances and many others (Kashani & DuBrule, 2009). SKF majorly deals with the business to business markets which mean that the bearings produced by the company are used as a raw material in other businesses. These kinds of markets are generally more price sensitive as the prices of the raw material producer affect the prices of the end products that the consumers are going to use. The competitive edge of SKF had always been the superior quality products which meant producing bearings that were durable and reliable. With high quality meant high prices to be paid; premiums for premium products. SKF produced highly engineered bearings as they knew that the bearings were being used in critical applications such as jet engines and gas turbines, where a small mistake or malfunctioning could lead to disastrous failures. Service, whether they are post sale or presale are of utmost importance. This helps and ensures the building of goodwill of any organisation. (Vartanian, 2010).  SKF worked with the trained and authorized distributors as rapid fulfillment of orders, delivery and receivables from customers and their collection should be smooth for SKF to work efficiently. Pricing for the aftermarket services was decided in synchronization with distributors who were supplying products from other brands as well. All the post purchase services were provided through SKF’s 1200 distributors which reached out to 50 thousand end users. SKF’s business is divided into three divisions: Industrial, Automotive and Service, each serving different set of customer groups. Industrial served 30 different industries including machine tools’ oil and gas and mining accounted for 30 percent of the sales. Automobile served home appliance manufacturers and OEMs of cars and trucks and served the vehicle repair and maintenance aftermarket and accounted for 35 percent of the companies sales. Service division gave SKF one-third of its sales providing end users, mostly factories, with replacement bearings. It served the industry both directly (20 percent) and with the help of it distribution channels (80 percent) (Kashani & DuBrule, 2009). Developing a full awareness of your situation can help with both strategic planning and decision-making (Bhushan, N & RAI 2004).So doing a SWOT analysis of SKF could help understand the company and the environment it is operating in, better. A SWOT analysis guides you to identify the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of an organisation. The value of a company doesn’t only lie in the hands of the assets a company own but the perspective of its customers are of utmost importance (L aw 2010).  .The strength of the company is that the SKF is a well established company which has developed to be a brand communicating high quality premium products. It has large customer base serving 2 million customers and it has a variety that no customer could match. The company is in the business for more than a hundred years now and has a global market share of 20 percent with net sales