APPLE INC CASE ANALYSIS
APPLE INC CASE ANALYSIS
Clint A. Persaud
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
October 2014
Question 1
Industry
From the beginning of time apple has operated in quite a few industries, the first being the Personal Computer in in 1976 (pg1) and then with the leadership of John Sculley they entered the Desktop Publishing industry from 1985 to 1993 where John Sculley also attempted to implement a low cost strategy (pg2). Scully didn’t stop there he also tried to forge an alliance with Apples rival IBM, this resulted a gross margin drop of 34% and the termination of Sculley (Pg 3). CEO, Gilbert Amelio then entered the picture with his price differentiation strategy which resulted in 1.6 billion dollar loss. (pg3) As a default Steve Jobs became the interim CEO in 1997 and that when the company really started to take off. Apple became a well diverse company with the leadership of Jobs they “had 15 product lines which were slashed down to 4 categories- desktop and portable Macintoshes, for consumers and professionals.” (Pg3) Not only did they have 15 different products which placed them in several different industries but they tried to depict themselves as “Worlds “greenest lineup of notebooks” that was energy efficient and used recyclable materials” (Pg 4)
Rivalry
The rivalry in this industry is high with the four top Pc vendors- Hewlett- Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer accounted for 53.6 percent of worldwide shipments. (Pg 5) Even though it was Apple who founded the first personal computer it was IBM that brought them into the conventional lives of society. Within this time period there were a lot of mergers and acquisitions making rivalry amongst firms even greater as every time this occurred these merged companies would have more market share and more capital to help their business.
Threat of substitutes
A lot of these products were similar in many ways and allowed consumers to do pretty much the same things. For
Clint A. Persaud
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
October 2014
Question 1
Industry
From the beginning of time apple has operated in quite a few industries, the first being the Personal Computer in in 1976 (pg1) and then with the leadership of John Sculley they entered the Desktop Publishing industry from 1985 to 1993 where John Sculley also attempted to implement a low cost strategy (pg2). Scully didn’t stop there he also tried to forge an alliance with Apples rival IBM, this resulted a gross margin drop of 34% and the termination of Sculley (Pg 3). CEO, Gilbert Amelio then entered the picture with his price differentiation strategy which resulted in 1.6 billion dollar loss. (pg3) As a default Steve Jobs became the interim CEO in 1997 and that when the company really started to take off. Apple became a well diverse company with the leadership of Jobs they “had 15 product lines which were slashed down to 4 categories- desktop and portable Macintoshes, for consumers and professionals.” (Pg3) Not only did they have 15 different products which placed them in several different industries but they tried to depict themselves as “Worlds “greenest lineup of notebooks” that was energy efficient and used recyclable materials” (Pg 4)
Rivalry
The rivalry in this industry is high with the four top Pc vendors- Hewlett- Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer accounted for 53.6 percent of worldwide shipments. (Pg 5) Even though it was Apple who founded the first personal computer it was IBM that brought them into the conventional lives of society. Within this time period there were a lot of mergers and acquisitions making rivalry amongst firms even greater as every time this occurred these merged companies would have more market share and more capital to help their business.
Threat of substitutes
A lot of these products were similar in many ways and allowed consumers to do pretty much the same things. For
Bibliography: Yoffie, David, and Penelope Rossano. “Apple inc. in 2012.” Harvard Business School 1 (2012): 30 print