Ming Fai Intl (3828) SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / MBA Resources
Personal & Household Prods.
Strategy / MBA Resources
Introduction to SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix for Ming Fai Intl (Hong Kong)
Based on various researches at Oak Spring University , Ming Fai Intl is operating in a macro-environment that has been destablized by – central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, technology disruption, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic ,
talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, etc
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University, we believe that Ming Fai Intl can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Ming Fai Intl, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning of Ming Fai Intl
2. Improving business portfolio management of Ming Fai Intl
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Hong Kong
4. Making a Personal & Household Prods. sector specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Ming Fai Intl
Strengths of Ming Fai Intl | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Ming Fai Intl are -
Ability to lead change in Personal & Household Prods.
– Ming Fai Intl is one of the leading players in the Personal & Household Prods. industry in Hong Kong. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in the Personal & Household Prods. industry in Hong Kong but also across the existing markets. The ability to lead change has enabled Ming Fai Intl in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Organizational Resilience of Ming Fai Intl
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing Ming Fai Intl does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Ming Fai Intl in Personal & Household Prods. industry is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Diverse revenue streams
– Ming Fai Intl is present in almost all the verticals within the Personal & Household Prods. industry. This has provided Ming Fai Intl 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.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Ming Fai Intl has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in – Ming Fai Intl staying ahead in the Personal & Household Prods. 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 Personal & Household Prods. industry
– Ming Fai Intl is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Ming Fai Intl has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Ming Fai Intl 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.
Analytics focus
– Ming Fai Intl 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 Personal & Household Prods. 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.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Ming Fai Intl 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.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Ming Fai Intl has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive Personal & Household Prods. industry. Secondly the value chain collaborators of Ming Fai Intl have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Training and development
– Ming Fai Intl 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.
Learning organization
- Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders at Ming Fai Intl emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Weaknesses of Ming Fai Intl | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Ming Fai Intl are -
Skills based hiring in Personal & Household Prods. industry
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Ming Fai Intl 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.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Hong Kong, Ming Fai Intl needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Need for greater diversity
– Ming Fai Intl 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.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Ming Fai Intl 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 Personal & Household Prods. industry using digital technology.
Aligning sales with marketing
– From the outside it seems that Ming Fai Intl needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the Personal & Household Prods. industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department at Ming Fai Intl can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Ming Fai Intl is planning to shift buying processes online.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Ming Fai Intl is one of the leading players in the Personal & Household Prods. industry, it takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the Personal & Household Prods. industry in last five years.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, Ming Fai Intl has high operating costs in the Personal & Household Prods. industry. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Ming Fai Intl lucrative customers.
High dependence on Ming Fai Intl ‘s star products
– The top 2 products and services of Ming Fai Intl still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in Personal & Household Prods. industry has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Ming Fai Intl has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee of Ming Fai Intl is just above the Personal & Household Prods. industry average. It needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Ming Fai Intl is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication can help Ming Fai Intl to provide better information regarding Personal & Household Prods. products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
No frontier risks strategy
– From the 10K / annual statement of Ming Fai Intl, it seems that company is thinking out the frontier risks that can impact Personal & Household Prods. 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.
Ming Fai Intl Opportunities | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities of Ming Fai Intl are -
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Ming Fai Intl can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Ming Fai Intl has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in Personal & Household Prods. sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled Ming Fai Intl to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Ming Fai Intl to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Ming Fai Intl is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Ming Fai Intl can utilize new technology in the field of Personal & Household Prods. industry to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Ming Fai Intl 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.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– consumer behavior has changed in the Personal & Household Prods. industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Ming Fai Intl 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. Ming Fai Intl 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.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Ming Fai Intl in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Personal & Household Prods. industry, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Buying journey improvements
– Ming Fai Intl can improve the customer journey of consumers in the Personal & Household Prods. 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.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Ming Fai Intl 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 Personal & Household Prods. industry.
Better consumer reach
– The expansion of the 5G network will help Ming Fai Intl to increase its market reach. Ming Fai Intl 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.
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 Ming Fai Intl 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.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Ming Fai Intl 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.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions in Personal & Household Prods. industry
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Ming Fai Intl in the Personal & Household Prods. industry. Now Ming Fai Intl can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Developing new processes and practices
– Ming Fai Intl can develop new processes and procedures in Personal & Household Prods. 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.
Threats Ming Fai Intl External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats of Ming Fai Intl are -
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Ming Fai Intl is facing in Personal & Household Prods. sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Ming Fai Intl in Personal & Household Prods. industry. The Personal & Household Prods. 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.
Regulatory challenges
– Ming Fai Intl 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 Personal & Household Prods. industry regulations.
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 Ming Fai Intl in the Personal & Household Prods. sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Ming Fai Intl business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Personal & Household Prods. industry will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Ming Fai Intl can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
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. Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl
– 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 Ming Fai Intl.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Ming Fai Intl needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Personal & Household Prods. industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Ming Fai Intl 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.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Ming Fai Intl has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Personal & Household Prods. industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Ming Fai Intl needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Personal & Household Prods. 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.
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 Ming Fai Intl.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Ming Fai Intl Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers at Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl 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 Ming Fai Intl needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
