Miranda Gold (MRDDF) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources

Introduction to SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Miranda Gold (United States)

Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Miranda Gold is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing energy prices, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, there is backlash against globalization, increasing transportation and logistics costs, geopolitical disruptions, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, etc

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Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Miranda Gold

SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Miranda Gold can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Miranda Gold, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Miranda Gold 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.

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SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix

SWOT analysis of Miranda Gold can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Miranda Gold
2. Improving business portfolio management of Miranda Gold
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a Gold & Silver sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Miranda Gold

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Strengths of Miranda Gold | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis

The strengths of Miranda Gold are -

Highly skilled collaborators

– Miranda Gold has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Gold & Silver industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Miranda Gold have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.

Operational resilience

– The operational resilience strategy of Miranda Gold comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Gold & Silver 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.

Cross disciplinary teams

– Horizontal connected teams at the Miranda Gold 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.

Ability to recruit top talent

– Miranda Gold is one of the leading players in the Gold & Silver industry in United States. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in United States. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.

Learning organization

- Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Miranda Gold emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.

Effective Research and Development (R&D)

– Miranda Gold has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Miranda Gold staying ahead in the Gold & Silver industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.

Training and development

– Miranda Gold has one of the best training and development program in Basic Materials 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.

Organizational Resilience of Miranda Gold

– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Miranda Gold does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.

Superior customer experience

– The customer experience strategy of Miranda Gold in Gold & Silver industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.

Strong track record of project management in the Gold & Silver industry

– Miranda Gold is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.

Innovation driven organization

– Miranda Gold is one of the most innovative firm in Gold & Silver sector.

Digital Transformation in Gold & Silver industry

- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Miranda Gold digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Miranda Gold 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.

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Weaknesses of Miranda Gold | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis

The weaknesses of Miranda Gold are -

Workers concerns about automation

– As automation is fast increasing in the Gold & Silver industry, Miranda Gold 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.

Ability to respond to the competition

– As the decision making is very deliberative at Miranda Gold, in the dynamic environment of Gold & Silver industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Miranda Gold has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.

Aligning sales with marketing

– From the outside it seems that Miranda Gold needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Gold & Silver industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Miranda Gold can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Miranda Gold is planning to shift buying processes online.

Capital Spending Reduction

– Even during the low interest decade, Miranda Gold 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 Gold & Silver industry using digital technology.

Products dominated business model

– Even though Miranda Gold has some of the most successful models in the Gold & Silver industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. Miranda Gold should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.

Lack of clear differentiation of Miranda Gold products

– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Miranda Gold needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.

Employees’ less understanding of Miranda Gold strategy

– From the outside it seems that the employees of Miranda Gold 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.

Slow to strategic competitive environment developments

– As Miranda Gold is one of the leading players in the Gold & Silver industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Gold & Silver industry in last five years.

Slow decision making process

– As mentioned earlier in the report, Miranda Gold has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Gold & Silver industry over the last five years. Miranda Gold even though has strong showing on digital transformation primary two stages, it has struggled to capitalize the power of digital transformation in marketing efforts and new venture efforts.

High cash cycle compare to competitors

Miranda Gold has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Gold & Silver industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.

Skills based hiring in Gold & Silver industry

– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Miranda Gold 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.

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Miranda Gold Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis

The opportunities of Miranda Gold are -

Using analytics as competitive advantage

– Miranda Gold has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Gold & Silver sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Miranda Gold to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Miranda Gold to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.

Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19

– consumer behavior has changed in the Gold & Silver industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Miranda Gold 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. Miranda Gold 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.

Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains

– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.

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 Miranda Gold 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.

Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in Gold & Silver industry

– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Miranda Gold in the Gold & Silver industry. Now Miranda Gold can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.

Creating value in data economy

– The success of analytics program of Miranda Gold has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Gold & Silver industry. This can help Miranda Gold to build a more holistic ecosystem for Miranda Gold products in the Gold & Silver industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.

Reforming the budgeting process

- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Miranda Gold can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.

Loyalty marketing

– Miranda Gold 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.

Building a culture of innovation

– managers at Miranda Gold 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 Gold & Silver industry.

Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities

– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.

Leveraging digital technologies

– Miranda Gold 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, Miranda Gold 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.

Buying journey improvements

– Miranda Gold can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Gold & Silver 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.

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Threats Miranda Gold External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis

The threats of Miranda Gold are -

Trade war between China and United States

– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Miranda Gold in Gold & Silver industry. The Gold & Silver 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.

Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution

– Miranda Gold has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Gold & Silver industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Miranda Gold needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Gold & Silver 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.

Easy access to finance

– Easy access to finance in Gold & Silver industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Miranda Gold can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.

High dependence on third party suppliers

– Miranda Gold 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.

Regulatory challenges

– Miranda Gold 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 Gold & Silver industry regulations.

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. Miranda Gold needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Gold & Silver industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.

Learning curve for new practices

– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Miranda Gold may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Gold & Silver sector.

Consumer confidence and its impact on Miranda Gold 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 Gold & Silver industry and other sectors.

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 Miranda Gold business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.

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 Miranda Gold in the Gold & Silver sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.

Shortening product life cycle

– it is one of the major threat that Miranda Gold is facing in Gold & Silver sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.

Environmental challenges

– Miranda Gold 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. Miranda Gold can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Gold & Silver industry.

Increasing wage structure of Miranda Gold

– 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 Miranda Gold.

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Weighted SWOT Analysis of Miranda Gold Template, Example

Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold 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 Miranda Gold needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

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