SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Amur Minerals (United Kingdom)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Amur Minerals is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, increasing energy prices, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, increasing commodity prices, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings,
increasing transportation and logistics costs, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, etc
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Amur Minerals can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Amur Minerals, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Amur Minerals
2. Improving business portfolio management of Amur Minerals
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United Kingdom
4. Making a Metal Mining sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Amur Minerals
Strengths of Amur Minerals | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Amur Minerals are -
Ability to lead change in Metal Mining
– Amur Minerals is one of the leading players in the Metal Mining industry in United Kingdom. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Metal Mining industry in United Kingdom but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Amur Minerals in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in Metal Mining industry
– Amur Minerals has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Amur Minerals to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the Metal Mining industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Amur Minerals to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Amur Minerals has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Amur Minerals staying ahead in the Metal Mining industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Amur Minerals has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Innovation driven organization
– Amur Minerals is one of the most innovative firm in Metal Mining sector.
High brand equity
– Amur Minerals has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Amur Minerals to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Amur Minerals has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Metal Mining industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Amur Minerals have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Amur Minerals is one of the leading players in the Metal Mining industry in United Kingdom. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in United Kingdom. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Organizational Resilience of Amur Minerals
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Amur Minerals does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Strong track record of project management in the Metal Mining industry
– Amur Minerals is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Diverse revenue streams
– Amur Minerals is present in almost all the verticals within the Metal Mining industry. This has provided Amur Minerals 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.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Amur Minerals 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.
Weaknesses of Amur Minerals | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Amur Minerals are -
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Amur Minerals has high operating costs in the Metal Mining industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Amur Minerals lucrative customers.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Amur Minerals needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Metal Mining industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Amur Minerals can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Amur Minerals is planning to shift buying processes online.
High dependence on Amur Minerals ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Amur Minerals still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Metal Mining industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Amur Minerals has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Amur Minerals is one of the leading players in the Metal Mining industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Metal Mining industry in last five years.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Amur Minerals is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Amur Minerals to provide better information regarding Metal Mining products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Amur Minerals is just above the Metal Mining industry average. It needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Amur Minerals is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Metal Mining industry, but Amur Minerals needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Amur Minerals to focus more on services in the Metal Mining industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Metal Mining industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in United Kingdom, Amur Minerals is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the Metal Mining industry.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Amur Minerals has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Metal Mining industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Lack of clear differentiation of Amur Minerals products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Amur Minerals needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of United Kingdom, Amur Minerals needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Amur Minerals Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Amur Minerals are -
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Identify volunteer opportunities
– Covid-19 has impacted working population in two ways – it has led to people soul searching about their professional choices, resulting in mass resignation. Secondly it has encouraged people to do things that they are passionate about. This has opened opportunities for businesses to build volunteer oriented socially driven projects. Amur Minerals can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Amur Minerals 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Amur Minerals 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.
Loyalty marketing
– Amur Minerals has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Amur Minerals 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Amur Minerals can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Metal Mining 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.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Amur Minerals to increase its market reach. Amur Minerals will be able to reach out to new customers. Secondly 5G will also provide technology framework to build new tools and products that can help more immersive consumer experience and faster consumer journey.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Amur Minerals in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Metal Mining industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Metal Mining industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Amur Minerals can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Developing new processes and practices
– Amur Minerals can develop new processes and procedures in Metal Mining industry using technology such as automation using artificial intelligence, real time transportation and products tracking, 3D modeling for concept development and new products pilot testing etc.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Amur Minerals has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Metal Mining industry. This can help Amur Minerals to build a more holistic ecosystem for Amur Minerals products in the Metal Mining industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Amur Minerals has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Metal Mining sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Amur Minerals to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Amur Minerals to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Threats Amur Minerals External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Amur Minerals are -
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Amur Minerals 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.
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.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Amur Minerals 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 Metal Mining industry.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Metal Mining industry are lowering. It can presents Amur Minerals with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Metal Mining sector.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Amur Minerals has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Metal Mining industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Amur Minerals needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Metal Mining sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Regulatory challenges
– Amur Minerals needs to prepare for regulatory challenges as consumer protection groups and other pressure groups are vigorously advocating for more regulations on big business - to reduce inequality, to create a level playing field, to product data privacy and consumer privacy, to reduce the influence of big money on democratic institutions, etc. This can lead to significant changes in the Metal Mining industry regulations.
Increasing wage structure of Amur Minerals
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Amur Minerals.
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 Amur Minerals business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Amur Minerals may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Metal Mining sector.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Metal Mining industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Amur Minerals can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Amur Minerals 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 Metal Mining industry and other sectors.
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 Amur Minerals.
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. Amur Minerals 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.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Amur Minerals Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals 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 Amur Minerals needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.