Global Marketing and Management
The central objective of this report is to perform an environmental analysis of a country in which our selected company shall aim to establish a market for its products and services. The company chosen for the purposes of this report is Apple Inc. The country selected for the analysis is The People's Republic of China. The aim of this report is to assist the management of Apple Inc in assessing whether the country presents a viable business opportunity or not. The product chosen for this purpose is the Apple iPhone 4S.
The Apple iPhone 4S is said to be the best technology that the company has come up with in the Iphone product line. With the dual-core A-5 chip, 8 megapixel iSight camera, io5 and iCloud functions coupled with a speech recognition personal assistant dubbed Siri, it is one the most dynamic and hi-tec gadgets available. It is ideal for the youth population that requires all applications and gadgets be packed into one. China with an estimated population of 1,343,239,923 (July 2012 est.) (2012) is one of the perfect target markets for this product?
Differentiating Between Market Structures
There are different perspectives in which to view Apple's market structure since they operate in so many different markets. One perspective could be from an internal approach, in which the organization could be perceived as somewhat monopolistic since their hardware and software is "closed" sourced. Apple protects its proprietary hardware and software and does not willingly provide their source code to unapproved developers. Therefore, it could be said that Apple has monopoly control over the goods, services, and software that will work with its products. This allows the organization to charge a considerable premium for many of its products; especially the accessories that work with main products.
Apple Inc. company overview and business operations
This paper presents the implications of VRINE Model for one of the largest IT corporations in the world – Apple Inc. The paper starts with a brief introduction to the company; its history, products, scale of operations, and market standing; and proceeds by appraising its resources and capabilities using the five dimensions or tools of VRINE Model, i.e. Value, Rarity, Inimitability, Non-Substitutability, and Exploitability. It concludes by summarizing the main ideas and findings from the discussion.
Steve Jobs Remarkable Career
There are two current events that make a discussion of Steve Jobs career an especially interesting endeavor. The first is that the co-founder and notorious Apple visionary stepped down as the company's chief executive (Zweig, 2011). Shortly after Jobs stepped down he passed away. Many health care professionals believe that Jobs death may have been preventable and attribute his early death to his choice of trying to treat his disease through an alternative medicine approach (Michelson, 2011). Jobs was actually aware of his condition fairly early in its development which provided him an opportunity to treat it with traditional approaches however Jobs refused.
Steve Jobs is often accredited as the man who turned around Apple Inc. from the verge of collapse on several junctures. Another headline that dominated many of the major media networks recently is that Apple just passed up Exxon Mobile to become the world's most valuable company (Magee, 2011). It is somewhat ironic that Apple achieved this accreditation with Jobs at the helm just shortly before he passed away. It is almost as if he held on long enough to see Apple reach this defining moment before letting the disease take his life.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Subject Q1) Do You
The growing popularity of the Internet has spawned crowdsourcing as new model of fund raising, pioneering by www.kickstarter.com. This innovative model is a distributed problem-solving and production model helping entrepreneurs and investors to launch a new product to the market place. From the novelty point of view, it is fast becoming a viable alternative to traditional funding models like equity or the debt route. Typically, crowdsourcing for financing is familiar as crowdfunding. Under this model, an innovator makes publicity of his funding requirements through the Internet to individual investors. The individual investors offer financial contribution which are thereafter consolidated by the platform and handed over to the project owner.