Iphone
Essays

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?

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.

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.

Merging up of small companies with large companies is most likely but the endeavor required wise strategy by keeping in consideration the both companies mission statement and user demands. Probability of high collision between the objectives is most likely in integration plan and sometimes after merging the company to be merging even lost its initial glory and stands nowhere in user community.

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.

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.

Apple Inc. is one of the well-known and recognized enterprises by not only the business community but populace from all over the world are cognizant about this corporation. It started off its business from the decade of 1970 that has been involved in the designing, manufacturing and offering its consumers with a wide range of innovative and technologically refined products like computers, software, music players and its related accessories, peripherals, and networking solutions.

Globalization initiatives have contributed to the need for many companies across the globe to expand their businesses beyond the local or domestic markets. The focus of this article is to analyze Apple, Inc., an American multinational that operates in several countries in the world. It begins with an analysis of the strategies for competing in international markets and how the firm is organized to gain regional or global advantage while remaining responsive to local conditions. This is followed by a summary of how the firm is organized internationally, its structure, and modus operandi, and whether it has resources to compete globally. The final part of the paper provides specific recommendations for Apple Inc to become a market leader in the next five years throughout its operations.

Apple Inc. (Apple) was built on January 3, 1977. It is presently engaged in manufacturing, designing and marketing mobile communication and media devices, personal computers, and portable digital devices. It also sells a number of related software, peripherals, services, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications. The Company's products and services comprises iPad, iphone, Mac, Apple TV, ipod a portfolio of consumer and professional software applications, the Mac OS X and ios operating systems, iCloud, and a number of accessory, service and support offerings. It also sells and provides digital content and applications through the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store. By the end of year 2011, the Company, as part of a consortium, obtained Nortel Networks Corporation's patent portfolio. In February 2012, the Company obtained app-search engine Chomp.

This paper is about an industry that has changed form. In this case, the smartphone industry which was an oligopoly, moved to monopolistic competition but appears to be shaking out back to oligopoly conditions. The industry is examined in terms of firm behavior, transaction costs and also the response of consumers and app developers to these changing conditions.