SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical (China)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – increasing transportation and logistics costs, geopolitical disruptions, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, increasing energy prices, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google,
increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical
2. Improving business portfolio management of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in China
4. Making a Electric Utilities sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical
Strengths of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical are -
Training and development
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has one of the best training and development program in Utilities 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 recruit top talent
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is one of the leading players in the Electric Utilities 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical in the Utilities sector have low bargaining power. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
High brand equity
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical staying ahead in the Electric Utilities industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Innovation driven organization
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is one of the most innovative firm in Electric Utilities sector.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Electric Utilities industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Strong track record of project management in the Electric Utilities industry
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Learning organization
- Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical in Electric Utilities industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Weaknesses of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical are -
Need for greater diversity
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Skills based hiring in Electric Utilities industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Employees’ less understanding of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical strategy
– From the outside it seems that the employees of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Lack of clear differentiation of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the Electric Utilities 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 bargaining power of channel partners in Electric Utilities industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in China, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Electric Utilities industry.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the Electric Utilities industry over the last five years. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Electric Utilities industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is planning to shift buying processes online.
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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
High dependence on Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Electric Utilities industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact Electric Utilities industry. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical are -
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. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Buying journey improvements
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Electric Utilities 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
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in Electric Utilities industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical in the Electric Utilities industry. Now Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can utilize new technology in the field of Electric Utilities industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Electric Utilities sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Electric Utilities industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Electric Utilities industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Electric Utilities sector.
Loyalty marketing
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
Threats Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical are -
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Electric Utilities industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Electric Utilities 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 Electric Utilities industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Electric Utilities sector.
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. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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.
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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry to Electric Utilities industry are lowering. It can presents Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Electric Utilities sector.
Environmental challenges
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Electric Utilities industry.
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. Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Electric Utilities 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical in the Electric Utilities sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical in Electric Utilities industry. The Electric Utilities 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.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 wage structure of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical
– 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical 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 Harbin Jiuzhou Electrical needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.