Strategic management comparison of Apple Inc and Samsung Group

Apple's business strategies are well aligned with the company's mission and vision statements. Those statements are best summarized as the desire to "create products that consumers will find easy to use and marry innovative technology to work productivity and personal entertainment" (Mallin and Finkle, 2011, p. 49). The synthesis of Apple's respective business strategies revolves around the confluence of work productivity and personal entertainment -- more so than many organizations, Apple has managed to integrate these two realms and reap the benefits accordingly. Thus, it is able to maintain a desirable prominence domestically while expanding its global operations to not only include critical facets of research, development, and supply chain operations, but also to include a growing customer base. It was largely able to achieve such an admirable presence by expanding its business beyond mere personal computing to not only making such computing ubiquitous, but shifting it into telecommunications and the audio entertainment industries with its influx of iPhones, iPods, iTunes, and their accessories. Subsequently, its mission and vision is well aligned with the long terms goals and strategic direction of the company.

The existing business strategies, domestic and global environments, industries and internal capabilities of Samsung involve a bevy of interests across vertical industries that are almost all focused on customer service. Virtually all of the technical innovations and products that Samsung provides are to assist people in some way -- that assistance spans basic communication needs to medical attention. While such a business strategy of providing customer service to improve the quality of lives for individuals is vast in scope, Samsung's individual strategies are equally as vast in their focus on globalization. Quite simply, the company's numerous pursuits are found in many different countries including throughout Asia, the Middle East, and the Westernized world. While the organization's basic strategy is to help people live better through the provisioning of customer service in numerous aspects of life, its mission and values of attempting to make the world better. Although such a mission may appear vague at first, it actually sums up the wide variety of interests and areas in which Samsung conducts business -- which includes real estate ventures, skyscraper construction, and numerous other aspects of life. In this respect, its approach towards its various business strategies is well attuned to its mission and values.

2. Apple's strengths include its varied businesses which include computing, mobile devices, entertainment, and a variety of hardware and software to facilitate these ventures. It also has a pulse on popular culture that relates to both the workplace and personal lifestyle -- it is considered cutting edge and dependable by a bevy of its customers. Its weaknesses include the fact that its former main product -- desktop computers -- seem to slowly be getting phased out by any variety of mobile options. Its opportunities lie in the every increasing mobile and internet population -- there are numerous ways it can exploit this fact. Its primary weaknesses come in the form of its competition which most eminently includes Microsoft in the realm of personal computing. The company's strengths influence its competitive position by providing it extreme relevance in contemporary society, whereas its weaknesses have forced it to explore mobile options. Those options (such as the iPhone) have proved extremely profitable in the mobile industry, while its competition forces it to continue innovating.

Samsung's strengths involve its vast product diversification and the numerous markets in which it has a formidable presence. Samsung is associated with almost every aspect of technology, and several industries that do not pertain to technology whatsoever. Its weaknesses involve high marketing costs and intense competition in the field of mobile devices. Its opportunities involve the Internet of Things primarily. Its threats include the businesses of their mobile competitors, which most eminently includes Apple. However, there are a number of other smartphone vendors that are challenging the duality between Apple and Samsung in this market. Its opportunities in the Internet of Things make it extremely competitive, and the leading vendor for this largely untapped market. Its threats force it to streamline processes and continue innovating in the mobile devices market. Its strengths enable it to stay competitive in a number of different industries. Its weaknesses force it to utilize savvier marketing to remain competitive in the mobile device industry. Samsung has an enviable position in the technology industry, but its competitive position requires it to reduce costs while splitting its attention between marketing and research and development to create the sort of innovations that will resonate with consumers -- and keep the competitors at bay.

3. Apple has been able to implement strategies that adopt to cultural differences to facilitate effective operations within global markets and create strategic initiatives with improved innovation excellence by striking up a number of creative partnerships. IBM has even partnered with its principle competitor, Microsoft, in order to make some of the latter's most notable products (Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office) compatible with Apple (Finkle and Mallin, 2010, p. 36). Such a move was a strategic innovation for the simple fact that Apple viewed Microsoft as presenting a means to further its own computing aims, instead of viewing Microsoft as a customer. Similarly, Apple has entered into partnerships with some of the most well-known technology companies -- AT&T, Google, Yahoo! And others -- to further its own presence and to create innovations that ultimately convenience its customers. In the process it also had to account for cultural differences attributed to its broadening global presence, which was manifested in its ubiquitously online Apple Store and ventures with Comp USA for the retail chain to provision Apple products exclusively in certain sections. Globally, the company employed laborers and utilized supply parts in different areas of the world while adapting to labor processes and cultural norms that were relevant there.

As a company that was initially founded in South Korea, Samsung has developed a potential for tailoring strategies around cultural differences to exploit the global market in which it competes. In fact, the most cogent evidence of this fact is revealed in an analysis of its presence in the United States -- particularly that which pertains to the marketing of its immensely popular Galaxy smartphones. Through the clever manipulation of a combination of advertising which includes online and conventional print and physical sources, the company has been able to build a substantial amount of hype (and critical preorders) for its Galaxy S6. Earlier this week the company had registered 20 million orders for the phone (Spence, 2015 Forbes), with those orders ranging around the world. The company has done so on a product that is not available exclusively through its marketing techniques.

4. The superiority of Apple's organizational competencies in terms of entrepreneurial capabilities is readily apparent from a simple evaluation of some of the products it has released. For instance, the company played an integral role in the development of the mouse during the first decade of Apple's existence due to innovations on the part of its co-founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs (Gladwell, 2011, p. 50). The superiority of its organizational design capabilities was also evinced in a similarly unconventional way. Typically, a company's CEO has to answer to its board of directors. When Jobs was brought on board as the CEO for the second time after he had originally been ousted from it, he replaced the existing board with his own who he believed would help him share the company's vision and the resurgence plan he had for it (Finkle and Mallin, 2010, p. 36). The superiority of its strategic capabilities is denoted by the fact that it was able to effect several key partnerships with many different entities, such as its partnership with AT&T to deliver iPhones and to expand its market presence.

A large part of the superiority of Samsung's organizational design capabilities is evinced by looking at the way this organization is structured. Incorporating a top down approach, Samsung is structured so that it can effectively expand and continue its overall strategic objective of globalizing its operation. The best example of this fact is its partnership program, which actively solicits joint ventures with companies across vertical industries in different parts of the world. With businesses in industries as diverse as financial services, machinery and heavy industries, and technology, there is no express need for the company to take this approach. However, doing so is an integral part of its overall strategy of expansion and globalization.

Samsung's entire history is based on its entrepreneurial capabilities, as the company began as a fishing exporting company and evolved into a multinational conglomerate. Samsung's entry enter the chemical business exemplifies this fact. By forming a partnership with the oil and gas company BP in 1989, Samsung leveraged this collaboration to begin selling chemical products in its native Korea shortly thereafter. Its superiority in its strategic capabilities is demonstrated in its proficiency in utilizing globalization practices to its advantage. The best indicator of this fact is its Global Code of Conduct document (Samsung, 2006), which outlines its ethics and normative behavior when interacting with others around the globe.

5. One appropriate new business strategy that Apple could utilize is to spur adoption rates of the internet globally. There are other companies that have adopted this strategy because it directly relates to their lines of business -- probably the most notable of these is Facebook and the aspirations of its creator Mark Zuckerberg. Nonetheless, directly increasing the number of people who utilize the internet could certainly help to maximize Apple's profitability, because there would be more people to leverage its internet connectivity devices including laptops, iPads, iPhones, and all of their accessories. Increasing the number of internet users means going directly into the proverbial third world and helping to supply the infrastructure for such connectivity. Apple, therefore, could partner with Facebook in this particular venture -- which would help both companies to reap the long-term benefits and ensure their chances of success.

Much in the same way that Apple should attempt to spur the adoption rates of the internet, Samsung should attempt to spur the adoption rates of the Internet of Things to maximize its profitability and competitiveness. Samsung already has invested in this interconnectivity of devices as evinced by its manufacturing of smart televisions and smart handheld devices. However, simply due to the sheer number of different electronic devices that this organization produces (including everything from washing machines to computer chips), it will definitely stand to benefit from increased adoption rates of what is in actuality the next plateau for big data and analytics. Many people are still not aware of the Internet of Things and the conveniences it can apply to daily life -- few are even aware of its applications in the industrial internet. Yet Samsung should actively market this technology phenomenon, and increase the number of products it produces to accommodate it.

6. Apple was able to enjoy a tremendous amount of success in terms of its horizontal integration and product diversification. Evaluating this success requires individuals to recollect that when Apple Computers was launched in the 1970's, its sole line of business was the selling of desktop computers. Today, of course, the company is renowned for a diverse line of products including iPods, iPads, iPhones, iTunes and a host of other accessories that has rendered its initial product (desktops) as "Apple's "dog"…due to its low relative market share" (Mallin and Finkle, 2011, p. 54). However, the brilliance of Apple's strategy is that each of its products is intrinsically related to one another. Thus, not only are they compatible with one another, but they actually extend on the capabilities that each of them offer. For instance, although iTunes was designed to give the company an entrance into the mP3 market, this market was related to computers and iTunes was initially only available on Apple computers. That combined functionality would eventually fuel the development of iPods and iPads, to cumulate in the unveiling of iPhones which extends on the capabilities of each of the aforementioned devices without making them obsolete.

Quite simply, there is no disputing the degree of success Samsung has reaped in terms of diversification of its product lines, which spans both horizontally and vertically. There is very little that is electronic that Samsung does not produce from computer parts to mobile devices to home and work-based appliances: it has also been involved in the manufacturing of petrochemicals, insurance and textiles. The fact that it is still present today as one of the most viable producers of technological devices and assets attests to its efficacy in its diverse portfolio. The business strategy that is directly responsible for this success is an extremely early and aggressive adoption of globalization. By utilizing the best resources in any multitude of countries, both to fuel its supply chain and to serve as its customer base, the company was an initiator of the multinational company phenomenon, and continues to utilize a globalization approach to fuel its many markets.