Executive Summary Space Antenna Inc. is a company that has started up to produce antennae for the telecommunications industry. The antennae will communicate with satellites in space. This is a growing industry, which creates opportunity for new entrants. The key success factors are to be able to innovate, which typically results in antennae that not only have more features and better performance than their predecessors but come in at a lower price as well. Thus, engineering skill is one of the most important things that will drive success. The organization has therefor e been built with the needs of R&D in mind, in order to ensure that we can bring to market the best products, and start to build market share that way. We are backed by a venture capital group, and they have brought in a professional management team, which will allow the founders – all engineers – to focus on doing what they do best, which is make the best antennae in history.

3. The Business

The business is a space antenna making operation. At the heart of the business is that idea that antennas can deliver more features at a lower price. This means that the current technology needs to be leapfrogged by the next generation of technology. Antennae are essential to communicating with satellites, and a lot of communications in this world are dependent on these aatellites to transmit information quickly from one part of the world to another, and in some cases to communicate information that is gathered by the satellites themselves back to the planet. The focus of Space Antenna, Inc. is to deliver the next generation of antenna that can do more, which in turn carries with it several benefits to the end user. The end user will be able to do more, which should allow it to be more efficient, and that in turn leads to higher productivity, greater efficiency, meaning both increased revenue and decreased costs, for dramatically increased profit.

The company will therefore be heavily invested in research and development, but there are several areas where we believe that technological breakthrough is close, and if we can achieve it, we will be able to win a lot of market share fairly quickly. We have founded this company with an engineering-forward mindset, because we believe that it is essential to success that we be the technological leaders in the business. Lagging in technology will only put us in a position to land smaller deals from less desirable clients, and we are seeking the big fish, and over the course of a few years a rather high market share. Thus, engineering is really the main point of emphasis at this...

The Industry
The antenna business is part of the greater telecommunications industry, so the clients are usually large telecoms, military and government. The keys to success in the industry are to continually increase transmission capacity and better connections, in particular to support high definition programming, or the transmission of massive data sets (Silverstein ,2013). Buyers want equipment that is "more reliable, easier to use, smaller and less expensive that before, just to stay competitive" (Silverstein, 2013). This is why our motto is "Include more, save more" because buyers want not only a feature-rich system, but one that is reliable, and cheaper. This sounds like a difficult task, but the reality is that this is where the antenna business is going, and with each technological innovation, those seemingly disparate goals can and are often met.

The overall size of the industry is substantial, when you think about how much we rely on telecommunications in our lives. The global antenna market is worth an estimated $17.54 billion today and will be worth $25.46 billion by 2023, given a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.61%. This means that the industry is growing faster than the economy as a whole, the result of our increasing appetite for connectivity (MI, 2017).

In general, there are a handful of major companies in the industry. There are a few different reasons for this. One, startup costs are relatively high. Technological advances are frequent, so any company wishing to enter the antenna business needs to have on its team engineers who are up to speed with the latest advancements. Capital requirements are high, and if the team cannot deliver a superior product there will be little demand for what it does produce. Research and development are essential to success. Most companies seek to create the best possible antennae at a low price, because the industry is highly competitive. However, the strong demand in the industry also means that there might well be room for an innovative new player. The buyers are generally large, and the antennae are critical to their business, so there is some bargaining power over buyers, but not a lot because of their size. There is probably bargaining power over suppliers, except in the case of rare components. The intensity of rivalry is high, because there are only a few major firms in the industry, and a few major customers. Each deal is actually quite important, especially the bigger deals in major markets. Competition for smaller deals is less intense. All told, the space antenna industry is…