Cost Leadership
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Cost Leadership
In business strategy, cost leadership is a strategy aiming to establish a competitive advantage by having the lowest cost of operation in the industry. Cost leadership is often driven by company efficiency, size, scale, scope and cumulative experience ( learning curve). A ''cost leadership strategy'' aims to exploit scale of production, well-defined scope and other economies (e.g., a good purchasing approach), producing highly standardized products, using advanced technology. In recent years, more and more companies have chosen a strategic mix to achieve market leadership. These patterns consist of simultaneous cost leadership, superior customer service and product leadership. For example, US retailer Walmart has succeeded in business due to its cost leadership strategy. The company has cut down on excesses at every point of production and thus are able to provide the consumers with quality products at low prices. Cost leadership is different from price leadership. A com ...
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Business Strategy
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates.qn, date=June 2018 Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning. Michael Porter identifies three principles underlying strategy: * creating a " unique a ...
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Customer Service
Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those who buy or use its products or services, either in person or remotely. Customer service is often practiced in a way that reflects the strategies and values of a firm, and levels vary according to the industry. Good quality customer service is usually measured through customer retention. Successful customer service interactions are dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the customer". Customer service for some firms is part of the firm's intangible assets and can differentiate it from others in the industry. One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization. It is expected that AI-based chatbots will significantly impact customer service and call centre roles and will increase productivity substantially. Many organisations have already adopted AI chatbots to improve their customer service experience.Krishnan, ...
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Michael Porter
Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited with creating Porter's five forces analysis, a widely used management framework. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists. His work has been recognized by governments, non-governmental organizations and universities. Early life and education Michael Porter's father was a civil engineer and Georgia Tech graduate who had also gone on to a career as an army officer. During Porter's childhood, his family moved around the United States, and to France and Canada. This contributed to Porter's interest in understanding the economic development ...
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Porter's Generic Strategies
Michael Porter's generic strategies describe how a company can pursue competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three generic strategies: lower cost, product differentiation, or focus. The focus strategy has two variants, cost focus and differentiation focus, so it is possible to see the concept in terms of four distinct strategies. A company chooses to pursue one of two types of competitive advantage, either via lower costs than its competition or by differentiating itself along dimensions valued by customers to command a higher price. A company also chooses one of two types of scope, either focus (offering its products to selected segments of the market) or industry-wide, offering its product across many market segments. The generic strategy reflects the choices made regarding both the type of competitive advantage and the scope. The concept was described by Michael Porter in 1980. Concept Porter wrote in 1980 that strategy targets either cost leadership, ...
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Price
A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation expected, required, or given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, especially when the product is a service rather than a physical good, the price for the service may be called something else such as "rent" or "tuition". Prices are influenced by production costs, supply of the desired product, and demand for the product. A price may be determined by a monopolist or may be imposed on the firm by market conditions. Price can be quoted in currency, quantities of goods or vouchers. * In modern economies, prices are generally expressed in units of some form of currency. (More specifically, for raw materials they are expressed as currency per unit weight, e.g. euros per kilogram or Rands per KG.) * Although prices could be quoted as quantities of other goods or services, this sort of barter exchange is rarely seen. Prices are sometimes quoted in terms of vouc ...
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Profit (accounting)
Profit, in accounting, is an income distributed to the ownership , owner in a Profit (economics) , profitable market production process (business). Profit is a measure of profitability which is the owner's major interest in the income-formation process of market production. There are several profit measures in common use. Income formation in market production is always a balance between income generation and income distribution. The income generated is always distributed to the Stakeholder (corporate), stakeholders of production as economic value within the review period. The profit is the share of income formation the owner is able to keep to themselves in the income distribution process. Profit is one of the major sources of economics , economic well-being because it means incomes and opportunities to develop production. The words "income", "profit" and "earnings" are synonyms in this context. Other terms See also * Gross income * Net profit * Profitability index * Rate ...
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Price Leadership
Tacit collusion is a collusion between competitors who do not explicitly exchange information but achieve an agreement about coordination of conduct. There are two types of tacit collusion: concerted action and conscious parallelism. In a concerted action also known as concerted activity, competitors exchange some information without reaching any explicit agreement, while conscious parallelism implies no communication. In both types of tacit collusion, competitors agree to play a certain strategy ''without explicitly saying so''. It is also called oligopolistic price coordination or tacit parallelism. A dataset of gasoline prices of BP, Caltex, Woolworths, Coles, and Gull from Perth gathered in the years 2001 to 2015 was used to show by statistical analysis the tacit collusion between these retailers. BP emerged as a price leader and influenced the behavior of the competitors. As result, the timing of price jumps became coordinated and the margins started to grow in 2010. ...
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Walmart
Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other countries. It is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. The company was founded in 1962 by brothers Sam Walton and Bud Walton, James "Bud" Walton in nearby Rogers, Arkansas. It also owns and operates Sam's Club retail warehouses. Walmart has 10,586 stores and clubs in 24 countries, operating under 46 different names. Walmart is the List of largest companies by revenue, world's largest company by revenue, according to the Fortune Global 500, ''Fortune'' Global 500 list in October 2022. Walmart is also the List of largest United States–based employers globally, largest private employer in the world, with 2.1 million employees. It is a publicly traded family-owned business (the largest such business in the world), as the company ...
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Dominance (economics)
Market dominance is the control of a economic market by a firm. A dominant firm possesses the power to affect competition and influence market price. A firms' dominance is a measure of the power of a brand, product, service, or firm, relative to competitive offerings, whereby a dominant firm can behave independent of their competitors or consumers, and without concern for resource allocation. Dominant positioning is both a legal concept and an economic concept and the distinction between the two is important when determining whether a firm's market position is dominant. Abuse of market dominance is an anti-competitive practice, however dominance itself is legal. Sources of market dominance Firms can achieve dominance in their industry through multiple means, such as; * First-mover advantage, * Innovation, * Brand equity, and * Economies of scale. First-mover advantages Many dominant firms are the first "important" competitor in their industry. These firms can achie ...
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Competitive Advantage
In business, a competitive advantage is an attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors. A competitive advantage may include access to natural resources, such as high-grade ores or a low-cost power source, highly skilled labor, geographic location, high entry barriers, and access to new technology and to proprietary information. Overview The term ''competitive advantage'' refers to the ability gained through attributes and resources to perform at a higher level than others in the same industry or market (Christensen and Fahey 1984, Kay 1994, Porter 1980 cited by Chacarbaghi and Lynch 1999, p. 45). The study of this advantage has attracted profound research interest due to contemporary issues regarding superior performance levels of firms in today's competitive market. "A firm is said to have a competitive advantage when it is implementing a value creating strategy not simultaneously being implemented by any current or potential player" (Barney 1991 cited ...
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Purchasing
Purchasing is the procurement process a business or organization uses to acquire goods or services to accomplish its goals. Although there are several organizations that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly between organizations. Purchasing is part of the wider procurement process, which typically also includes expediting, supplier quality, transportation, and logistics. Details Purchasing managers/directors, procurement managers/directors, or staff based in an organization's Purchasing Office, guide the organization's acquisition procedures and standards and operational purchasing activities. Most organizations use a three-way check as the foundation of their purchasing programs. This involves three departments in the organization completing separate parts of the acquisition process. The three departments do not all report to the same senior manager, to prevent unethical practices and lend credibility to the process. These depa ...
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Economies Of Scope
Economies of scope are "efficiencies formed by variety, not volume" (the latter concept is "economies of scale"). In the field of economics, "economies" is synonymous with cost savings and "scope" is synonymous with broadening production/services through diversified products. Economies of scope is an economic theory stating that average total cost (ATC) of production decrease as a result of increasing the number of different goods produced. For example, a gas station primarily sells gasoline, but can sell soda, milk, baked goods, etc. and thus achieve economies of scope since with the same facility, each new product attracts new dollars a customer would have spent elsewhere. The business historian Alfred Chandler argued that economies of scope contributed to the rise of American business corporations during the 20th century. Economics The term and the development of the concept are attributed to economists John C. Panzar and Robert D. Willig (1977, 1981). Their 1981 article n ...
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