SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Kingsmen Creatives Ltd (Singapore)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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%, increasing commodity prices, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing transportation and logistics costs, geopolitical disruptions, central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, wage bills are increasing,
challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, increasing energy prices, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Kingsmen Creatives Ltd, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd
2. Improving business portfolio management of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Singapore
4. Making a Business Services sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd
Strengths of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd are -
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd in the Services sector have low bargaining power. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd in Business Services industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Organizational Resilience of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Kingsmen Creatives Ltd does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Learning organization
- Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Kingsmen Creatives Ltd emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Business Services industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Kingsmen Creatives Ltd staying ahead in the Business Services industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
High brand equity
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Innovation driven organization
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is one of the most innovative firm in Business Services sector.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Business Services 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.
Training and development
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has one of the best training and development program in Services industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Weaknesses of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd are -
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the Business Services industry using digital technology.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the Business Services industry, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd needs to come up with a strategy to reduce the workers concern regarding automation. Without a clear strategy, it could lead to disruption and uncertainty within the organization.
High dependence on Kingsmen Creatives Ltd ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Business Services industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Lack of clear differentiation of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Singapore, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is one of the leading players in the Business Services industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Business Services industry in last five years.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Business Services industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in Singapore, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Business Services industry.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has high operating costs in the Business Services industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Kingsmen Creatives Ltd lucrative customers.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative at Kingsmen Creatives Ltd, in the dynamic environment of Business Services industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
High dependence on existing supply chain
– The disruption in the global supply chains because of the Covid-19 pandemic and blockage of the Suez Canal illustrated the fragile nature of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Kingsmen Creatives Ltd vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Need for greater diversity
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Kingsmen Creatives Ltd Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd are -
Manufacturing automation
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Business Services sector. It can use CAD and 3D printing to build a quick prototype and pilot testing products. It can leverage automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do faster production at lowers costs, and it can leverage the growth in satellite and tracking technologies to improve inventory management, transportation, and shipping.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can utilize new technology in the field of Business Services industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Business Services industry. This can help Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to build a more holistic ecosystem for Kingsmen Creatives Ltd products in the Business Services industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to increase its market reach. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Kingsmen Creatives Ltd to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
Developing new processes and practices
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can develop new processes and procedures in Business Services 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Business Services 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.
Loyalty marketing
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
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. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Threats Kingsmen Creatives Ltd External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd are -
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.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Business Services industry are lowering. It can presents Kingsmen Creatives Ltd with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Business Services sector.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Business Services industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Kingsmen Creatives Ltd needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Business Services 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.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Kingsmen Creatives Ltd is facing in Business Services sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
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.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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.
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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd.
Environmental challenges
– Kingsmen Creatives Ltd needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Business Services industry.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Kingsmen Creatives Ltd in Business Services industry. The Business Services industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd in the Business Services sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Business Services industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Business Services industry and other sectors.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Kingsmen Creatives Ltd Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd 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 Kingsmen Creatives Ltd needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.