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Haberberg and Rieple: Strategic Management

Chapter 05

Go to www.amazon.co.uk (at the foot of the welcome page you will find links to Amazon’s other country sites, which you can use for this exercise if you prefer). Look at the list of businesses featured in the Our Shops list down the left hand side of the page (or in the set of tabs across the top). Construct a table in which you list the success factors for a retailer in each of these businesses. Are there any where Amazon’s particular strengths (breadth of range of offerings, speed of delivery) are not particularly important? Are there some that require capabilities, such as the ability to deliver after-sales service, which are not required for others? Are there any that you are surprised to see an organization like Amazon selling – i.e. which do not fit well with your perception of Amazon’s brand values?

Go to www.siemens.com. Click on the link to Industries to gain a list of the industries in which Siemens is active as participant or supplier. Pick three or four of these, and compile a relatedness matrix (see Worked Example 5.1 for an example for Sony).  You can use the data on the individual businesses on the Siemens site, along with internet sources such as Wikipedia and Google, to give you an idea of the competences and success factors for each business. On balance, do you think that Siemens has an appropriate degree of relatedness between the different parts of its portfolio?

Virgin is apparently one of the most diverse UK companies. Visit the following websites and use the information and links within them to identify the Virgin businesses, and make an assessment of Virgin’s diversification performance. You should look at issues like the ways in which the companies are owned, their relatedness -  the types of links between the businesses, if any, and make an assessment about whether these businesses pass the ‘better off’ test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Richard_Branson%27s_business_ventures

http://www.virgin.com/home.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group