Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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%, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, technology disruption, wage bills are increasing, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, there is backlash against globalization, increasing transportation and logistics costs,
supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , increasing household debt because of falling income levels, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix
2. Improving business portfolio management of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in China
4. Making a Water Transportation sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix
Strengths of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix are -
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix staying ahead in the Water Transportation industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Analytics focus
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Water Transportation 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.
Digital Transformation in Water Transportation industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
High brand equity
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix in the Transportation sector have low bargaining power. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Water Transportation industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is one of the leading players in the Water Transportation industry in China. It is in a position to attract the best talent available in China. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Water Transportation 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.
Learning organization
- Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Training and development
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has one of the best training and development program in Transportation 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix are -
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Water Transportation industry using digital technology.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the Water Transportation industry, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
High dependence on Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Water Transportation industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative at Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix, in the dynamic environment of Water Transportation industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is one of the leading players in the Water Transportation industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Water Transportation industry in last five years.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Water Transportation industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Water Transportation industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is planning to shift buying processes online.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to provide better information regarding Water Transportation products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Lack of clear differentiation of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Need for greater diversity
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix are -
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Water Transportation industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Developing new processes and practices
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can develop new processes and procedures in Water Transportation 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.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Water Transportation sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix to increase its market reach. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Loyalty marketing
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Water Transportation industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Manufacturing automation
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Water Transportation 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.
Buying journey improvements
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Water Transportation 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.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can utilize new technology in the field of Water Transportation industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Threats Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Water Transportation industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Water Transportation industry are lowering. It can presents Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Water Transportation sector.
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. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Water Transportation industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
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. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix
– 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix.
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.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Water Transportation sector.
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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix.
Regulatory challenges
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Water Transportation industry regulations.
Environmental challenges
– Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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. Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Water Transportation industry.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Water Transportation industry and other sectors.
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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix in the Water Transportation sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix 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 Chang Jiang Shipping Phoenix needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
