Team Season

Player: The first step is to use the Value Net Model to identify the players that influence your business and understand what roles they play. The players are customers, suppliers, substitutors (competitors), and complementors. An effective business strategy may entail bringing in new players or pushing out existing one. For example, if you only have one supplier, you may want to pay for other suppliers to enter the game in order decrease the raw material costs. Additional complementors can also work for the company advantage, by increase the value of the product to consumers. Company´s can make money in the game by the old-fashioned way, or by paying. Such payments can be in cash, or can ask for a guaranteed sales contract, contibutions to R&D, bid-preparation expenses, or a last-look provision

Corticeira Amorim is the largest producer and supplier of cork stoppers worldwide and in whom the main wine producers trust. Corticeira morim is a cork company, they have a monopoly on cork products.  In a monopoly market, the seller faces no competition, as he is the sole seller of goods with no close substitute.

Natural cork closures are used for about 80% of the 20 billion bottles of wine produced each year. After a decline in use as wine-stoppers due to the increase in the use of synthetic alternatives, cork wine-stoppers are making a comeback and currently represent approximately 60% of wine-stoppers today. Synthetical alternatives (plastic stoppers/Screwcaps Stoppers) appear on the 1960s, however it was only in 1989 that the industry emerged as a serious enterprise.

When synthetic alternatives come along, Corticeira amorim added value was greatly reduced. This mean that the entrance of synthetical alternatives had bring some benefits for the wine industry, because corticeira amorim had to lower the price of their cork stoppers in order to compete with the synthetic alternatives. It had also promote innovation.