Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Wonderful Sky Financial is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – geopolitical disruptions, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing commodity prices, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy,
increasing household debt because of falling income levels, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Wonderful Sky Financial
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Wonderful Sky Financial can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Wonderful Sky Financial, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Wonderful Sky Financial
2. Improving business portfolio management of Wonderful Sky Financial
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Hong Kong
4. Making a Business Services sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Wonderful Sky Financial
Strengths of Wonderful Sky Financial | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Wonderful Sky Financial are -
Innovation driven organization
– Wonderful Sky Financial is one of the most innovative firm in Business Services sector.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Wonderful Sky Financial has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
Organizational Resilience of Wonderful Sky Financial
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Wonderful Sky Financial does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Learning organization
- Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Wonderful Sky Financial emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Wonderful Sky Financial has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Wonderful Sky Financial staying ahead in the Business Services industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Wonderful Sky Financial in the Services sector have low bargaining power. Wonderful Sky Financial has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Wonderful Sky Financial to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Wonderful Sky Financial in Business Services industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Analytics focus
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry. The technology infrastructure of Hong Kong is also helping it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Ability to lead change in Business Services
– Wonderful Sky Financial is one of the leading players in the Business Services industry in Hong Kong. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Business Services industry in Hong Kong but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Wonderful Sky Financial in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
High brand equity
– Wonderful Sky Financial has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Wonderful Sky Financial to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Strong track record of project management in the Business Services industry
– Wonderful Sky Financial is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Training and development
– Wonderful Sky Financial has one of the best training and development program in Services 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 Wonderful Sky Financial | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Wonderful Sky Financial are -
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of Wonderful Sky Financial, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact Business Services 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Wonderful Sky Financial has some of the most successful models in the Business Services industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. Wonderful Sky Financial should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Wonderful Sky Financial is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Wonderful Sky Financial to provide better information regarding Business Services products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the Business Services industry, Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Wonderful Sky Financial has high operating costs in the Business Services industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Wonderful Sky Financial lucrative customers.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Wonderful Sky Financial is one of the leading players in the Business Services industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Business Services industry in last five years.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Wonderful Sky Financial is just above the Business Services 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.
Lack of clear differentiation of Wonderful Sky Financial products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Wonderful Sky Financial needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
High bargaining power of channel partners in Business Services industry
– because of the regulatory requirements in Hong Kong, Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry using digital technology.
Wonderful Sky Financial Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Wonderful Sky Financial are -
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Wonderful Sky Financial has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in Business Services industry. This can help Wonderful Sky Financial to build a more holistic ecosystem for Wonderful Sky Financial products in the Business Services industry by providing – data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Manufacturing automation
– Wonderful Sky Financial can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Business Services 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Wonderful Sky Financial can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Wonderful Sky Financial operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Business Services sector.
Loyalty marketing
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
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 Wonderful Sky Financial 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
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Wonderful Sky Financial has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Business Services sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Wonderful Sky Financial to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Wonderful Sky Financial to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Wonderful Sky Financial is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Wonderful Sky Financial can utilize new technology in the field of Business Services industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Buying journey improvements
– Wonderful Sky Financial can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Business Services 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, Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Threats Wonderful Sky Financial External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Wonderful Sky Financial are -
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Wonderful Sky Financial business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Wonderful Sky Financial in Business Services industry. The Business Services 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 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. Wonderful Sky Financial needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Business Services industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Business Services industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry are lowering. It can presents Wonderful Sky Financial with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the Business Services sector.
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.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Wonderful Sky Financial is facing in Business Services sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
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. Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
Regulatory challenges
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Business Services industry regulations.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, Wonderful Sky Financial may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Business Services sector.
Environmental challenges
– Wonderful Sky Financial 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. Wonderful Sky Financial can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Business Services industry.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Wonderful Sky Financial has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Business Services industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Wonderful Sky Financial needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Business Services sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Wonderful Sky Financial Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial 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 Wonderful Sky Financial needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.