Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund (SWZ) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources
Strategy / MBA Resources
Introduction to SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund (United States)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – geopolitical disruptions, increasing energy prices, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, increasing commodity prices, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, there is backlash against globalization,
central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund
2. Improving business portfolio management of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in United States
4. Making a sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund
Strengths of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund are -
Successful track record of launching new products
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Analytics focus
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is putting a lot of focus on utilizing the power of analytics in business decision making. This has put it among the leading players in the industry. The technology infrastructure of United States is also helping it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Ability to lead change in
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is one of the leading players in the industry in United States. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the industry in United States but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Innovation driven organization
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is one of the most innovative firm in sector.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund in the sector have low bargaining power. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Strong track record of project management in the industry
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Digital Transformation in industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in industry
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is one of the leading players in the 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
- Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Weaknesses of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund are -
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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Skills based hiring in industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to provide better information regarding products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Employees’ less understanding of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of United States, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is planning to shift buying processes online.
High bargaining power of channel partners in industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in United States, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 industry.
Lack of clear differentiation of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Need for greater diversity
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has high operating costs in the industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund lucrative customers.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is just above the 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.
Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund are -
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Loyalty marketing
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in industry. This can help Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund to build a more holistic ecosystem for Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund products in the industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can improve the customer journey of consumers in the 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can utilize new technology in the field of 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in sector.
Threats Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund are -
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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund.
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.
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. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Increasing wage structure of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund
– 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund is facing in sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund prominent markets.
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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund in the sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Environmental challenges
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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. Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the industry.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 industry and other sectors.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to industry are lowering. It can presents Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the 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.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund 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 Swiss Helvetia Closed Fund needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.