Contemporary Strategic Management - Essay Example

The report will be divided into two segments. The first segments will cover the strategic analysis of the company and the second part of the study will cover the strategic choice and strategic implementation. The strategic analysis will be mainly carried out to find the current situation of the company and the strategies used by them to operate in the market place. In order to evaluate those strategies of Vodafone, several strategic frameworks will be utilized. The strategic frameworks which will be utilized in this study are SWOT framework, PESTEL analysis, and BCG matrix.

Apart from that, to analyse the UK telecom industry, Porter’s five forces framework will be used. The tools will be directly applied on Vodafone to identify its current situation, performance and ability. Furthermore, the report will also suggest the alternative courses of action by which Vodafone can operate and market its products efficiently in the future. After that an alternative will be chosen and its selection will be justified. Finally, the process of implementing the strategy will be enlightened.

SECTION I – STRATEGIC ANALYSIS Vodafone: A Brief Overview Vodafone group Plc. is a UK based multinational company involved in the business telecommunication products and services. The company was founded in the year 1991. However its history goes back to 1983, when it used to operate as Racial Telecom (Vodafone, 2012a). Previously, the company had its headquarters at Berkshire, however recently it moved to London, United Kingdom. The company has presence in places such as Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, Europe and USA.

Some of the major products and services of the company are prepaid and post paid voice services, mobile data services, MMS and SMS services, handsets, land-lines and digital television among others. It employs around 70,000 employees around the world. According to the recent media publications, the company holds a mammoth base of 407 million subscribers around the world. Vodafone in listed in the London Stock Exchange and has listing in NASDAQ. With the changing business environment and rapid technological growth, the expectation of customers has also increased.

Hence in order to meet the needs of the customers, Vodafone periodically updates its product portfolio by launching new products. For example implementation of 3G is the latest addition. The competitors of the company are Tesco, Fresh, Sainsbury, Virgin, BT Mobile and One Tel among others. Situational Analysis Situation analysis is a method by which companies evaluate their internal and external environment. This helps in understanding the firm’s business environment, customers, capabilities and core competencies (Davis, 2008).

In this context i.e. to understand and identify the business environment, capabilities and core competencies of Vodafone, several situation analysis tools will be used. To understand the industry porter’s five forces will be used and to gauge the external business factors PESTEL analysis will be used. In addition, to get an in depth information about the internal environment of the organization, tools such as SWOT framework and BCG matrix will be used. SWOT