SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated (Japan)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – wage bills are increasing, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, geopolitical disruptions, increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, technology disruption, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic ,
there is backlash against globalization, increasing commodity prices, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated
2. Improving business portfolio management of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Japan
4. Making a Coal sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated
Strengths of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated are -
Highly skilled collaborators
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Coal industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Digital Transformation in Coal industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Innovation driven organization
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is one of the most innovative firm in Coal sector.
Learning organization
- Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is one of the leading players in the Coal industry in Japan. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in Japan. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has effective processes in place that helps in exploring new product needs, doing quick pilot testing, and then launching the products quickly using its extensive distribution network.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated in Coal industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated staying ahead in the Coal industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Coal industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Ability to lead change in Coal
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is one of the leading players in the Coal industry in Japan. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Coal industry in Japan but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Diverse revenue streams
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is present in almost all the verticals within the Coal industry. This has provided Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Weaknesses of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated are -
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Japan, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Skills based hiring in Coal industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Need for greater diversity
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has taken concrete steps on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the efforts so far has resulted in limited success. It needs to expand the recruitment and selection process to hire more people from the minorities and underprivileged background.
High dependence on Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Coal industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has high operating costs in the Coal industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated lucrative customers.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has some of the most successful models in the Coal industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Coal industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is planning to shift buying processes online.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
Employees’ less understanding of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated don’t have comprehensive understanding of the firm’s strategy. This is reflected in number of promotional campaigns over the last few years that had mixed messaging and competing priorities. Some of the strategic activities and services promoted in the promotional campaigns were not consistent with the organization’s strategy.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated, in the dynamic environment of Coal industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is one of the leading players in the Coal industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Coal industry in last five years.
Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated are -
Buying journey improvements
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Coal industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. It can provide automated chats to help consumers solve their own problems, provide online suggestions to get maximum out of the products and services, and help consumers to build a community where they can interact with each other to develop new features and uses.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Coal industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can take advantage of these changes in consumer behavior to build a far more efficient business model. For example consumer regular ordering of products can reduce both last mile delivery costs and market penetration costs. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can further use this consumer data to build better customer loyalty, provide better products and service collection, and improve the value proposition in inflationary times.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can utilize new technology in the field of Coal industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Coal sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Coal industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Coal sector.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can still utilize the low interest rates to borrow money for capital investment. Secondly it can also use the increase of government spending in infrastructure projects to get new business.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Coal industry.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Coal industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in Coal industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated in the Coal industry. Now Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Threats Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated are -
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Coal industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Coal industry are lowering. It can presents Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Coal sector.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in Coal industry and other sectors.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated prominent markets.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
New competition
– After the dotcom bust of 2001, financial crisis of 2008-09, the business formation in US economy had declined. But in 2020 alone, there are more than 1.5 million new business applications in United States. This can lead to greater competition for Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated in the Coal sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is facing in Coal sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated can face lack of demand in the market place because of Fed actions to reduce inflation. This can lead to sluggish growth in the economy, lower demands, lower investments, higher borrowing costs, and consolidation in the Coal industry.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Taiheiyo Kouhatsuorporated needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.