Apple Case Study

1. What 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.

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.

2. 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