SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Dahu Aquaculture (China)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Dahu Aquaculture is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, technology disruption, geopolitical disruptions, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic ,
competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing transportation and logistics costs, etc
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Dahu Aquaculture can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Dahu Aquaculture, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Dahu Aquaculture
2. Improving business portfolio management of Dahu Aquaculture
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in China
4. Making a Fish/Livestock sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Dahu Aquaculture
Strengths of Dahu Aquaculture | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Dahu Aquaculture are -
Highly skilled collaborators
– Dahu Aquaculture has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Fish/Livestock industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Dahu Aquaculture have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Digital Transformation in Fish/Livestock industry
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Dahu Aquaculture digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Training and development
– Dahu Aquaculture has one of the best training and development program in Consumer/Non-Cyclical 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.
Ability to lead change in Fish/Livestock
– Dahu Aquaculture is one of the leading players in the Fish/Livestock industry in China. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Fish/Livestock industry in China but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Dahu Aquaculture in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Dahu Aquaculture has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Dahu Aquaculture staying ahead in the Fish/Livestock industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Strong track record of project management in the Fish/Livestock industry
– Dahu Aquaculture is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Learning organization
- Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Dahu Aquaculture emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Dahu Aquaculture 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.
High brand equity
– Dahu Aquaculture has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Dahu Aquaculture to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy of Dahu Aquaculture comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the Fish/Livestock 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.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Dahu Aquaculture has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Diverse revenue streams
– Dahu Aquaculture is present in almost all the verticals within the Fish/Livestock industry. This has provided Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Weaknesses of Dahu Aquaculture | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Dahu Aquaculture are -
Lack of clear differentiation of Dahu Aquaculture products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Dahu Aquaculture needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Dahu Aquaculture is just above the Fish/Livestock 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.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of China, Dahu Aquaculture needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Need for greater diversity
– Dahu Aquaculture 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 cash cycle compare to competitors
Dahu Aquaculture has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Fish/Livestock industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
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 Dahu Aquaculture supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Dahu Aquaculture is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Dahu Aquaculture vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Dahu Aquaculture 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 Fish/Livestock industry using digital technology.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative at Dahu Aquaculture, in the dynamic environment of Fish/Livestock industry it has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Dahu Aquaculture has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Dahu Aquaculture is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Fish/Livestock industry, but Dahu Aquaculture needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Dahu Aquaculture to focus more on services in the Fish/Livestock industry rather than just following the product oriented approach.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Dahu Aquaculture needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Fish/Livestock industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Dahu Aquaculture can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Dahu Aquaculture is planning to shift buying processes online.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Dahu Aquaculture has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Fish/Livestock industry over the last five years. Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Dahu Aquaculture Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Dahu Aquaculture are -
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Dahu Aquaculture can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Dahu Aquaculture operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Fish/Livestock sector.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Loyalty marketing
– Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Fish/Livestock industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Manufacturing automation
– Dahu Aquaculture can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Fish/Livestock 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.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Dahu Aquaculture 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 Fish/Livestock industry.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in Fish/Livestock industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Dahu Aquaculture in the Fish/Livestock industry. Now Dahu Aquaculture can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Buying journey improvements
– Dahu Aquaculture can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Fish/Livestock 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.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Dahu Aquaculture 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.
Threats Dahu Aquaculture External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Dahu Aquaculture 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 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 dependence on third party suppliers
– Dahu Aquaculture high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Dahu Aquaculture.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture prominent markets.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Dahu Aquaculture has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Fish/Livestock industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Dahu Aquaculture needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Fish/Livestock 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 Fish/Livestock industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Dahu Aquaculture can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Environmental challenges
– Dahu Aquaculture 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. Dahu Aquaculture can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Fish/Livestock industry.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Dahu Aquaculture may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Fish/Livestock sector.
Increasing wage structure of Dahu Aquaculture
– 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 Dahu Aquaculture.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Dahu Aquaculture 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 Fish/Livestock industry and other sectors.
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. Dahu Aquaculture 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.
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. Dahu Aquaculture needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Fish/Livestock industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Dahu Aquaculture Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture 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 Dahu Aquaculture needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.