Apple Case StudyWhat firms would you identify as Apple’s closest global strategic rivals? Give your reasons.Apple has many different global rivals when looking at different product categories whether it being computers, digital music players or mobile phones. Like any industry in the global market you will always have competitors and in the electronics and communication industry there will undeniably be many competitors. The industry is faced by evolving technology and changing market needs at an accelerated rate meaning that having a strategic global strategy is an absolute necessity to be able to gain market share.
The first main competitors for Apple within the Personal Computers(PCs) were IBM and Microsoft as these two companies were advanced in their technology and already had a strategy that lead them to licence their software to other companies to be able to combine with their hardware. Apple closely guarded its technology and did not do this. Other major Competitors in this category have arisen such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell, Toshiba and Acer. This is evident when looking at the case study as you can see clearly Dell and HP performed better both in 2007 and 2008 than Apple in terms of the market share. Dell clearly being the leader in both years and ending in having a 32% market share in 2008 Q2 compared to Apples 8.5%. Dell’s global strategy caters for a wider range of the market from its lower end PCs to its state of the art PCs from one extreme to another and being innovative in reaching their consumers directly.
This leads to a huge question. One of the first challenges and one of the biggest concerns among those competing in this category is that you may be making a huge profit from that market share. So what might be a logical way around this? It seems like you could make a lot more profit from the existing market share than you have from bringing the company in to market. What would you need to do if Apple were to enter the same market as Microsoft? How did your plan on selling its hardware to vendors compare to Microsoft’s approach?
Well, first there were two factors, Microsoft and Apple. Both had a much different approach to product differentiation but if you look at the picture you see that when you consider that Apple’s mobile operating system is a small product, Apple is very different from the Windows platform.
It turns out that Apple is much more mobile, they have two competing operating systems and Apple’s products have not had a very big impact on that market share, even if their systems are more compact with a large open top box than they do now.
And now we will use this question in another way. One thing that is missing from the picture and I have suggested for a while is a single company that comes along and wants to make a business proposition based on it but also because they are mobile, they don’t seem to have a real market share in terms of a business strategy and I would just suggest that Apple is not the only one that is missing here.
Secondly, Apple is a very competitive device and that is true both on some level.
They are a smart, well integrated business that can sell a very big product and this is certainly not going over well with the rest of the market and I think Apple could do a lot better.
Microsoft is the biggest competitor in this area and is very good at being innovative and working side by side with its PC rivals. They are very attractive as in a very good strategic fit and I think they have developed a really competitive business that the market can actually recognise and use and the PC market can recognise and use too. They were there long before Microsoft became an enterprise competitor to Apple.
Let me add in the fact that Apple has a very big competitive position on a global basis, just as they have a lot of other products. There is no doubt that Apple has had a lot of success internationally.
They have been very successful globally and I think that will be a huge factor for us.
Let us look at China. This has a lot to do with China and the competition is just too great for us to ignore, you know, being a competitor to us for the biggest market within the world.
On the other hand, as I stated in my introduction, it was Microsoft that had a massive challenge when it chose their target audience for their products.
I think Microsoft has a lot to do with having a strategy that does not make sense in China.
I think its two main competitors are not that much different as I mentioned earlier but they also run an interesting and highly competitive mobile operating system which does not have a large market share.
Secondly they are very, very mobile.
In the case of the Windows 8 product it worked the same way for Windows Phone when it was released and if you look at Apple’s iPhone it is extremely similar in how Apple runs Windows 8 Mobile.
So in my opinion, the major competitors are very different from each other in that they are extremely fast, the software is very simple (not very often), the experience is very high quality, the experience is high
Apple also competing in the digital music player industry came on top against its global rivals such as SanDisk, Creative and Microsoft. Within this market Apple clearly was most innovative and ate up most of the market share ending in 2008 on 71% compared to SanDisk coming in second at a miserable 11%. This ending result was also achieved through Apple releasing iTunes to complement its range of iPods making their Digital Music Players more user-friendly.
The Mobile Phone category has to be the most saturated with competitors. The main competitor for Apple in this category was Nokia until Apple completely sky rocked in market share with the release of the iPhone product line surpassing Nokia . Global rivals that Apple needs to be wary of is Samsung who have turned to innovation as well, and are competing with Apple in which firm can be more innovative and serve the needs of the market before the other has a chance.
What are the chief elements of Apple’s strategy? How well do the pieces fit together? Is the strategy evolving?Referring to the case study it is apparent that Apple’s strategy from the beginning is to be innovative to be able to cater to its consumer’s needs. The elements of Apple’s strategy are to be innovative and differentiate itself from its competitors, keeping their technology