Guangdong Hotata A (603848) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources
Fabricated Plastic & Rubber
Strategy / MBA Resources
Introduction to SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Guangdong Hotata A (China)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Guangdong Hotata A is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, increasing household debt because of falling income levels,
technology disruption, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Guangdong Hotata A
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Guangdong Hotata A can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Guangdong Hotata A, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Guangdong Hotata A
2. Improving business portfolio management of Guangdong Hotata A
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in China
4. Making a Fabricated Plastic & Rubber sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Guangdong Hotata A
Strengths of Guangdong Hotata A | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Guangdong Hotata A are -
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Analytics focus
– Guangdong Hotata A 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 Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. The technology infrastructure of China 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.
Innovation driven organization
– Guangdong Hotata A is one of the most innovative firm in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber sector.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Guangdong Hotata A comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
Diverse revenue streams
– Guangdong Hotata A is present in almost all the verticals within the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. This has provided Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Strong track record of project management in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry
– Guangdong Hotata A is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Guangdong Hotata A has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Guangdong Hotata A have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Training and development
– Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry
– Guangdong Hotata A has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Guangdong Hotata A to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Guangdong Hotata A to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Guangdong Hotata A in the Basic Materials sector have low bargaining power. Guangdong Hotata A has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Guangdong Hotata A to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Guangdong Hotata A has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Guangdong Hotata A staying ahead in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Weaknesses of Guangdong Hotata A | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Guangdong Hotata A are -
High dependence on Guangdong Hotata A ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Guangdong Hotata A still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Guangdong Hotata A has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Guangdong Hotata A is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Guangdong Hotata A to provide better information regarding Fabricated Plastic & Rubber products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in China, Guangdong Hotata A 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 Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry.
Need for greater diversity
– Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry, Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Skills based hiring in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Guangdong Hotata A needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Guangdong Hotata A can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Guangdong Hotata A is planning to shift buying processes online.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Guangdong Hotata A has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry over the last five years. Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Guangdong Hotata A is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry, but Guangdong Hotata A needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Guangdong Hotata A to focus more on services in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Guangdong Hotata A is just above the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Guangdong Hotata A is one of the leading players in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry in last five years.
Guangdong Hotata A Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Guangdong Hotata A are -
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Guangdong Hotata A can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Guangdong Hotata A in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Guangdong Hotata A can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
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. Guangdong Hotata A can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Guangdong Hotata A 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 Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry.
Loyalty marketing
– Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Developing new processes and practices
– Guangdong Hotata A can develop new processes and procedures in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
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 Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Guangdong Hotata A has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. This can help Guangdong Hotata A to build a more holistic ecosystem for Guangdong Hotata A products in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Guangdong Hotata A is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Guangdong Hotata A can utilize new technology in the field of Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Guangdong Hotata A can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Threats Guangdong Hotata A External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Guangdong Hotata A are -
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.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Guangdong Hotata A has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Guangdong Hotata A needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
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.
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. Guangdong Hotata A needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
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 Guangdong Hotata A in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
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 Guangdong Hotata A business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Environmental challenges
– Guangdong Hotata A 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. Guangdong Hotata A can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry.
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 Guangdong Hotata A.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Guangdong Hotata A in Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry. The Fabricated Plastic & Rubber 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.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A prominent markets.
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. Guangdong Hotata A 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.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Fabricated Plastic & Rubber industry are lowering. It can presents Guangdong Hotata A with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Fabricated Plastic & Rubber sector.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Guangdong Hotata A may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Fabricated Plastic & Rubber sector.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Guangdong Hotata A Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A 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 Guangdong Hotata A needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.