disney-pixar merger a case study analysis

Nottingham University Business School

Undergraduate Programmes

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS STRATEGY 2[N13KL2]

Case Analysis Report- “Philips vs. Matsushita: Competing Strategic and Organisational Choice.”

Radia SYED

Student ID: 008093

COPY [1]

Radia Syed: 008093 International Business Strategy 2 (N13KL2)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents...................................................................................................................2

Executive Summary...............................................................................................................3

Introduction...........................................................................................................................4

Motivations in overseas expansion.......................................................................................6

Means of internationalisation...............................................................................................7

Mentalities.............................................................................................................................7

External forces of conflicts faced, and corresponding responses........................................10Philips: Forces for Local Responsiveness...................................................................................................................10Matsushita: Forces for Global integration & Forces for Worldwide learning..........................................11

Strategic objectives and means of building competitive advantage...................................13Philips: seeking multinational flexibility.....................................................................................................................13Matsushita: seeking global efficiency............................................................................................................................14

Innovation models and corresponding challenges faced....................................................17Philips: Local-for-local...........................................................................................................................................................17Matsushita: center-for-global model.............................................................................................................................18

Organisational-models adopted & means of managing the changes..................................19

The road to developing transnational organisations...........................................................20

Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 22

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Executive Summary

This report aims to examine the different strategic and restructuring approaches adopted by

two of the biggest competitors in the global consumer-electronics (CE) industry- Dutch firm

Philips and Japan’s Matsushita- as they evolved from the pre-World War 2 era to afterwards,

with both forced to constantly enhance their products through building the appropriate

strategies that stem from their internal corporate structures and internal linkages.

Additionally, main findings illustrate how both firms evolved their organisational structures

and strategies that allowed them to create distinctive competences, and their simultaneous

responses to the external environments; how global competitiveness depends on the

organizational-capability, and the limitations of classic multinational and global models that

Philips and Matsushita respectively implemented are also illustrated.

While it’s been concluded that Philips and Matsushita have successfully developed their

competencies and reformed their structures into transnational organisations’ style, key

recommendations include: aligning product-divisions with each other to allow mutual

understanding and coherence of the firm’s goals, and configuring their value-chains such

that it leads to cost savings yet maximum efficiency, by adopting globally-efficient tactics like

their competitors since lowering costs are a priority given the current economic-climate.

It should be noted that due to the limited word-count, only relevant, selected points have

been discussed.

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Introduction

Two of the biggest giants in the fast-paced industry of consumer-electronics (CE)1, Holland’s

Philips and Japan’s Matsushita are no strangers to state-of-the-art innovation. Known for

their fierce rivalry that dates decades back, both have emerged with distinctive

organisational-capabilities and competencies, formed from their individual cultural-

backgrounds and various strategies adopted throughout the years.

Striving to be leaders in the competitive CE-segment through maximising different parts of

their value-chains, both firms aim to offer the best consumer experience with top-class

innovation and high-quality in their offerings. Yet despite their far-reaching presence and

success, they’ve also encountered several challenges in their paths to becoming

international leaders in the CE-segment, as a result of their organisational structures,

external threats, and other external conflicting objectives that may have hindered their

growth.

This report thus will address the various strategies they adopted, their motivations for

internationalisation and organisational structures, and the internal and external challenges

they experienced.

1 The global CE-industry is forecasted to reach US $932 billion by 2017, with a CAGR of 5.37% over the next five years. (Fritz. J, Lucintel, 2012)

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Motivations for overseas expansion

Figure-1Motivations to

internationalisePre-war Post-war

Philips

Matsushita

Philips Matsushita

‘Traditional’ motivations

Market Expansion ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔Resource seeking ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

Strategic-asset seeking ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔‘Emerging’

motivationsSeek Scale economies ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

Increasing R&D investments

✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

Global scanning & Building Learning capabilities

✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

Holland’s small market-size made Philip explore new markets abroad. Here, being exposed

to new technologies or market-needs in the individual countries stimulated and required

more innovative product-development via R&D, as seen by its product-portfolios’ expansion

(radios, X-ray tubes) that prompted Philip’s expansion further into larger international

markets, to meet consumers’ demand for fresh inventions.

Conversely, ever-falling prices due to increased manufacturing efficiency that characterises

the CE-industry- whereby competitors’ manufacturing continues to shift to lower-wage

countries, propelled Matsushita to reduce and move its electronics’ production-costs to the

Americas/Europe, enabling it to achieve long-term economies-of-scale via resource-seeking

factors.

✔: of less importance ✔: of high (er) importance ✔: very important

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But pre-war objectives differed from post-war objectives. Therefore, as strategic resources

are intangible-resources involving the firm’s technology and core-competencies like

knowledge/employees’ skills etc. (Dunning, 1993), Matsushita was also motivated by

strategic-asset seeking objectives because to beat the competition, manufacturers were

forced to constantly enhance their products or support emerging technologies. Being “fast

to market”, it did so via technology-exchanges, R&D-partnerships and licensing agreements

with rival Philips. These alliances allowed it to benefit from other firms’ technical-knowledge

bases given its ‘copycat’ reputation, to strengthen their competitive-edge in the CE-market.

Means of internationalisation

Figure-2Pre-requisites/reasons for means of internationalisation

Regions the firms expanded into & year of entry

Location-specific

advantages

Ownership-specific

advantages

Organisational capabilities

Philips

Japan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia (1899) ✔ ✔ ✔

USA, France (1912) ✔UK ✔

China, Poland, Mexico (2002) ✔

Japan/home market (1950-1960s) ✔ ✔

Matsushita

Southeast-Asia, Central & South America (1960s) ✔Canada, USA, UK (Mid

1970s)✔

North America, Europe, Southeast-Asia (1986) ✔

Internationalisation is a process by which firms increase their involvement in international

✔: of less (or no) importance ✔: of high importance: ✔: very important

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business activities (Johanson et.al, 1993).

Thus Philips began ‘internationalising’ by exporting to diverse markets (Japan, Canada) first

that possessed the above advantages, then entered joint-ventures in other countries to gain

market acceptance because the focus/objectives were different at different time points. It

then entered a contractual agreement with GE to exchange technology between them.

Similarly, while Matsushita also relied on a licensing-agreement and technology-exchange

with rivals Philips at first to improve its R&D, the 1950s saw it begin exporting its black-and-

white TV-sets, to eventually setting up an overseas branch office- MECA, in USA.

Mentalities

Mentalities evolve over time. Initially internationalising with a multidomestic strategic

mindset, Philips wished to exploit inter-country differences, like differing TV-transmission

standards. Viewing their market as multidomestic reinforced their objective to localise their

products in response to varied customer needs/buying preferences, in country-specific

markets. As this would later see decentralised-control occurring through establishing

sales/production subsidiaries worldwide and consequently foster close interaction with

local-markets, Philips could later customise both its product-offerings and

marketing/distribution strategies accordingly for each market. Despite being cost-intensive,

being locally-responsive could ensure steady future revenue.

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Figure 3. (Own construction.)

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Matsushita initially seeked a global outlook/strategy, intending to gain global market-share

leadership (post-war), and viewing markets as having common needs, underlining its goal to

globally-standardise by having world products to build volume. Exploiting low-cost

production locations in its value-chain led to lower cost-structures, whilst maintaining

centralised-control over its overseas production-units to oversee quality improvements.

Therefore, achieving global economies-of-scale in purchasing/manufacturing and product-

development were amongst Matsushita’s goals.

Figure 4. (Own construction)

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External forces of conflicts faced, and corresponding responses

Figure 5

3 sets of Conflicting Environmental Forces (Bartlett, 2011)

OrganisationForces for:

global integration & coordination

Forces for: local/national

differentiation & responsiveness

Forces for: worldwide innovation & learning

Philips

Matsushita

Philips: Forces for Local Responsiveness

Figure-5 suggests this maybe Philips’ most challenging force due to consumers’ high

switching-costs, reinforcing the need for rapidly-evolving innovation to satisfy their

demands. Moreover, given European countries’ differing technical-standards and assuming

that certain consumer-groups rejected standardised global products’ homogenized product

design and performance because of the countries’ diversity that Philips’ major markets were

in, e.g. India and China, these growing pressures for localisation encouraged Philips to

provide globally-innovative yet locally-relevant products (matching their decentralised

model) to satisfy various emerging, country-specific consumer-needs in the CE-segment for

healthcare, lighting- Philips Australia created the first stereo-TV, and Philips of UK created

the first teletext-TV.

: of less importance : of high importance : very important

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Japanese competitors who were shifting electronics’ production to low-wage areas like

Asia/South-America and simultaneously capturing the audiocassette mass-market, were

threats too, pressurising Philips to abandon its V2000 videocassette format in 1970, due to

Philips North-America deciding to outsource VHS-products being manufactured under

license from Matsushita. This minimised the risk of future financial losses for Philips.

Technological-innovations’ convergences also made Philips dispatch numerous product line-

managers to its most competitive markets, to link product-divisions more directly to markets

abroad and brainstorm new ideas: domestic-appliance and electric-shaver lines moved to

USA and Japan respectively to getting closer to the customers/market-segments. Assuming

this would facilitate interaction amongst them, this would both make: identifying

consumers’ needs easier by being accordingly updated with them, and managers more

globally aware of new competition and evolving technologies and skillsets that they could

acquire later to sustain Philips’ innovative edge.

Matsushita: Forces for Global integration & Forces for Worldwide learning

Global-integration is defined as “business operations’ coordination and control, across

national borders” (Cray, 1984). As increasing post-war globalisation brought convergence in

technological-innovation, Matsushita sought globally-integrated operations to take

maximum advantage of economies-of-scale, by standardising products instead of localising,

which enhanced customer preferences through its now global products/brands offered.

As Kogut (1984) suggests that integrated MNCs gain competitive-advantages from exploiting

differences in national resource-endowments, Matsushita accordingly responded to Japan’s

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rising labour-costs by shifting basic production and assembly-operations to South-America

and Europe’s low-wage countries. With a tightly coordinated network of its standardised

TVs, VCRs, and DVD-plants now in high-cost end markets and low-cost manufacturing-

centers, global-integration rewarded Matsushita with new “cost-savings and global-

efficiencies” (Chen, 2006).

Continued cost-cutting by closing inefficient plants, as part of Matsushita’s VC-21 plan that

included changing old mass-production assembly-lines to flexible manufacturing systems in

Japan and 170 international plants. The systems’ ability of quick, low-cost switching of one

product-line to another created economies-of-scope, improving Matsushita’s cost-conscious

image in the competitive post-war era.

Moreover, Matsushita’s international subsidiaries’ innovative thinking was faltering. So

Matsushita integrated domestic and overseas operations by shifting operational control

nearer to local markets: Japanese headquarter functions relocated to North-America and

Southeast-Asia by fostering R&D partnerships & technical exchanges with other firms to

collaborate on new innovations. Although this required transferring Matsushita’s

manufacturing practices/know-how and process technologies across countries through its

expatriate Japanese technical-managers, this would at least ensure creative ideas and

consistency in product-design/manufacturing, that’s essential in CE. (Figure-6)

However, ‘forces for worldwide learning/innovation’ gained more importance for Matsushita

towards the end 90s, again due to its international subsidiaries’ lack of innovation (Figure-5).

Rising convergences in digital-technologies and high product-development costs pushed

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Matsushita to a: licensing agreement with Microsoft in 1998 to use the Microsoft-Windows

CE operating-system in Matsushita's future audio-visual products and personal-computer

devices, “as a means to fill the technology gap” (BB, 2011), and additionally, a strategic-

alliance to innovatively collaborate on projects combining digital audio-visual and personal-

computer technologies. This promised to bring consumers closer to converging digital

technologies’ benefits.

Figure-6.

Own construction. Taken from McKinsey Consumer & Shopping Insight Report, 2012

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Strategic objectives and means of building competitive advantage

Both firms’ strategic-objectives were designed according to what the conflicting forces were.

Although multinational-flexibility, innovation and learning, and global-efficiency are all

necessary to help obtain competitive-advantage, not all were equally important to Philips

and Matsushita.

Although Philips’ objectives differed at various different points due to circumstances like

WW2, different CEOs and economic-conditions which led it to renew its strategic intent, its

initially aimed to seek multinational-flexibility by hedging macroeconomic risks against the

forthcoming war and its aftereffects by shifting its research-laboratories that were the core

of its technological innovations to England. Despite this relocation’s high-costs, time/effort,

Philips ensured that its most vital assets were at least protected in a politically-neutral

country against further external threats, temporarily. This would maintain consistency; not

disruptions- in product-development’s planning. Yet the 1930s Depression also caused

countries to impose trade barriers, causing Philips to build local production-facilities in its

foreign markets to ensure its flow of products.

Considering the above, Philips shifted more towards achieving global-efficiency over time,

due to increasing globalisation that saw Japanese competitors capturing the audiocassette

and microwave-ovens’ mass market. As sustainable competitive-advantage is the ability to

offer superior customer value on an enduring or consistent basis, where competitors are

unable to easily imitate the firm’s capacity for value creation (Collis et.al, 1995), to build this,

Philips diversified its portfolio from CE to data-systems and telecommunications, to spread

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risks and widen choice for various consumer types in different markets. Since this

diversification required product-standardisation and thus low-cost production to minimise

these high investments/costs, Philips set up production-facilities in low-cost regions like Asia,

and Eastern-Europe, thus resulting in scale-economies and accordingly, “major cost savings”

(Chen, 2006).

So Prahalad’s Integration-Responsiveness (IR) framework (Figure-7) suggests that Philips lies

here due to its multidomestic strategy, where focusing on external flexibility through

national-responsiveness dominates with strategic decisions decentralized to each country, to

enable adaptation of products, services, and/or products to local/country-specific customer

demands (Ghoshal, 1987). This happened through Philips’ widely dispersed physical and

human-resources (Figure-8), resulting in decentralised control of its sales organisations in

fourteen European countries, China and Brazil.

Matsushita

Philips

Figure-7

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After post-war growth made its own Japanese market’s growth saturated, Matsushita began

seeking global-efficiency in new markets, because “beating their Western counterparts in

operational-effectiveness, they could simultaneously offer: lower costs and superior quality”

(Porter, 1996). Employing these, since global-efficiency involves lowering inputs’ value/costs

or increasing outputs’ values, put Matsushita’s position in Figure-7 under a global strategy

which “views the world as a single marketplace and thus, offers standardized products

(Kedia, 2002)”.

Although in practice, this strategy is employed by firms serving multiple host country

markets with internationally branded goods being produced from a single location- in

Matsushita’s case, Osaka, Japan- nevertheless, Matsushita gained a competitive-advantage

over others by exploiting national differences in labour costs: shifting basic production to

Figure-8

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low-wage regions like Asia/South-America generated major cost-savings and scale-

economies.

As cost-advantages arise from performing particular activities more efficiently than

competitors, activities then are the basic units of competitive-advantage (Porter, 1996). Thus

Matsushita achieved new economies-of-scope upon upgrading its mass-production

techniques to more flexible manufacturing-systems worldwide, because this allowed quick,

low-cost switching of one product-line to another. This flexibility could parallel market-

demands in CE as they change, now allowing Matsushita to enlarge its

product-portfolio/product-lines.

As “most Japanese companies imitate and emulate one another” (Porter, 1996), eventually

Matsushita’s inability to develop innovation overseas started faltering in the 90s, resulting in

purchasing US-based media-entertainment giant MCA Inc., for $6.6 billion, to dominate

technological hardware and entertainment industries’ growing alliance. Thus given software

and hardware technologies’ simultaneous developments, Matsushita obtained movie,

recording and broadcasting industries through diversifying from hardware to software

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through MCA’s acquisition. Obtaining scope-economies from shared investments/costs

across markets, Matsushita’s now possession of high-profile movie and TV-programming to

use for its HD-TV would give it a competitive-advantage over Western rivals Sony (whom

they had lagged behind in audio-visual and entertainment fields).

So here, unlike their European competitors who kept rationalising manufacturing, through

building global brands and then “de-skilling competitors through alliances” (Prahalad, 1996),

Matsushita established that an organisation’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn

new ones may be the most defensible competitive-advantage of all.

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Innovation models and corresponding challenges faced

Using local-for-local model based on subsidiary-based knowledge development, Philips leant

on competitive-innovation rather than competitive-imitation (Matsushita), and a culture

that facilitates innovation builds a sustainable, long-term competitive-advantage.

In this model’s context, it required three key capabilities of sensing, responding, and

implementing (BB, 2011) where Philips’ decentralised and independent NOs promptly

sensed and responded to the local consumer preferences/differences- thus positioning them

close to the markets to sense/respond to the differences made it easier to capture the local

target-market after closely identifying their needs. By accordingly adjusting to significant

local-pressures, Philips could customise its product-offerings and marketing/distribution

strategies fittingly for each market through decentralised sales and production-subsidiaries

and implement by collaborating with other subsidiaries to exploit the resulting new products

worldwide.

However, the decentralized-approach caused weak coordination between the independent

product-divisions and NOs, given Philips’ failure to persuade NACP to sell the V200

videocassette-format, who rebelled and sold the VHS. This caused Philips difficulties in

innovating and launching new products for local-markets, when it started lagging behind its

more globally-efficient competitors who captured the audiocassette-market first. Thus only

until integration and knowledge-sharing among units exist, will firms benefit from their

collaborative experiences.

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Philips also risked duplicating products, due to lack of communication between subsidiaries.

And inter-subsidiary communication is vital in R&D, to ensure consistency and unnecessary

repetition of ideas. This could have generated unnecessary costs for Philips: due to this

dispersed approach, coordination on different ideas/projects became demanding and

decentralisation made it difficult to create synergies across the organisation and capture the

innovation, given the autonomous business-units.

Matsushita’s center-for-global model suggested that Japan’s already renowned reputation

as one of the world’s best innovators in CE influenced Matsushita to put its headquarters as

worldwide opportunities’ sensors at home-country level itself. Matsushita’s centralised

resources and capabilities were used to create new products and technology in the main

R&D-center to respond, and were implemented globally via subsidiaries to the local markets.

Product-divisions maintained strong operating-control over their offshore operations too.

Unfortunately, Matsushita’s highly-centralised R&D operations and tall structure suggested

inflexibility given its numerous hierarchical levels- this resulted in slow processes to manage

fast-moving change in CE trends and innovation. So when the Japanese economy collapsed

in 2001’s ‘tech-wreck recession’, Matsushita suffered its first quarterly financial losses due to

its lack of speed and efficacy in responding to the external-environment’s technological

changes, and thus failing to sustain its competitive edge.

Although their strategy of depending on other competitors for innovation is risky yet

effective given their strength in imitating competitors’ products, here Matsushita’s

headquarters risked market insensitivity by not being as aware of local happenings in

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consumer-trends -that’s essentially their main role. Basically, centralised control stifled

creativity/innovation at the foreign subsidiaries instead of stimulating it like Philips did, when

this was highly desired for their CE developments overseas.

This reduced their speed of responses to market changes, when Matsushita was forced to

adopt JVC’s own 1975 VHS format, instead of creating its own in the first place. This

concludes that without the right processes to foster the right innovative and adaptive

culture, neither creativity nor innovation can surface.

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Organisational-models adopted & means of managing the changes

Philips initially followed a decentralized-federation organisational-model, based on a

multidomestic-strategy whose focus was national-responsiveness. In anticipation of the war,

transferring top managers and research staff to USA and England respectively, and thereby

distributing/decentralising its key assets overseas made subsidiaries more autonomous and

self-sufficient, as this model requires. Having own local plants, Philips’ subsidiaries could

independently modify their products/marketing-tactics to meet widely differing consumers’

needs, e.g. national TV-transmission standards. As this fostered more personal relationships

instead of formal structures, management-style accordingly encouraged more delegation to

occur, eventually creating a “loose federation of Philips’ national subsidiaries; each focused

on its local market” (BB, 2011).

But In 1987, CEO Klugt restructured Philips to globalise both product-development and its

currently decentralised and product-matrix structure into increased control over domestic

subsidiaries, aiming for more efficient scale-of-production. He rationalised Philips’ operations

around the four global divisions instead of the fourteen PDs, assigning a single top manager

over PDs, NOs and an IPC, thereby eliminating dual leadership. This, eliminating inefficient

plants and converting some into International Production-Centers (IPCs) that each served

numerous NOs, consequently increased PD-managers’ control over NO’s and production.

Thus more coordination and growing interdependence between plants and NOs resulted,

Figure 8. Decentralised federation model

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creating higher production-quality and greater innovation (Holt, 1998).

Conversely, Matsushita developed a centralised-hub organisational-model in the 70s to 80s,

underlining its global strategy to capture global scale-economies. Its divisional-structure let

headquarters enforce tight cost/operational control on its foreign-subsidiaries through cross-

border and quality-assurance technology-transfer by expatriating their Japanese technical-

managers, making Matsushita more prompt and effective in reacting to the fluctuating

market-conditions then. This model also concentrated its main assets and manufacturing to

product-development activities at the center, thus Matsushita retained its “culturally and

people-dependent, and communications-intensive management system” (BB, 2011) by also

using its headquarters’ power to control their foreign subsidiaries, given the short

communication channels because of on-the-go, expatriate managers.

Although Matsushita had formed its global-competitiveness based on its centralized

operations, it restructured from centralised to a decentralised organisation during mid-80s,

now focusing on developing innovation in overseas subsidiaries. Thus “Operation

Localisation” was launched to heighten creativity and flexibility in overseas branches’

entrepreneurial undertakings through localising technology/materials to improve

subsidiaries’ expertise, increasing local nationals in key positions overseas, and distributing

capital by shifting production-facilities to low-wage countries. Matsushita also relocated

Figure 9. Centralised-hub model

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regional-headquarter functions from Japan to North-America and Southeast-Asian markets,

consequently enhancing autonomy to subsidiaries and their ability to respond faster to local-

market changes and preferences, because of their now locally-controlled, own market

strategy. Yet what’s interesting is that Matsushita’s management’s started

adapting/responding to local needs only after forty years of international operations.

The road to developing transnational organisations

Simply put, a transnational organisation operates across the world, simultaneously pursuing

a combination of local-responsiveness through customisation, cost-reduction through

standardization and optimum value-chain configuration” (Gupta et.al, 2003). 1990s was

experiencing major changes in the form of new emerging competitors, thus propelling firms

towards adopting this structure.

Flexible, integrative/multidimensional approaches embody transnationals, and this capability

is typically constructed over time as the organisation evolves and learns to deal with various

types of business problems in different overseas locations. Thus through pre/post-war

portfolio-diversification and shifting production-facilities- at specific times, Philips and

Matsushita respectively paralleled transnationals, who retain what works and eliminate

what doesn’t by emphasising scale-efficiencies, whilst sometimes pursuing local-

responsiveness. Judging which factors needed to be prioritised and sacrificed e.g. money,

physical-resources etc. made this difficult.

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Both firms also possessed distributed yet interdependent capabilities that characterise

transationals, with internationally-located plants and national-subsidiaries achieving global-

scale through specialising activities. E.g. Philips’ efficient plants were converted into IPCs

whereby management regarded each worldwide unit as a source of skills, capabilities and

knowledge that could be harnessed for the whole organisation’s benefit, that ensured

flexible responses to changing worldwide demand-and-supply in CE-industry.

So although Philips and Matsushita successfully developed transnationals in their own way

by pursuing different strategic actions at different times, ‘‘in reality, it’s difficult to achieve a

pure transnational strategy/organisation because of the conflicting goals’’ (Hill, 2006) and

risks that they still had to consider in their internal and external-environment.

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Conclusion

While Philips and Matsushita may be sustainable in today’s CE-industry (Appendix-1) by

competitive standards (e.g. revenue), what strategies worked for them then may not work

now due to ever-changing circumstances like increased globalisation, and more brand-

conscious consumers today etc. Although both firms made errors in their restructuring

whereby certain objectives were not met, more importantly- the transition would have been

smoother had both firms’ employees been given more time to adapt to their new structure,

as is always the case with radical change. Furthermore, while Philips’ post-war attempt to

become global leaders wasn’t too successful- unlike Matsushita- it still had capabilities that

Matsushita lacked to an extent (and vice-versa), e.g. its innovative ability to develop new

technologies, which made Philips successful in the first place. However, as environments

change, Matsushita overtook Philips, who accordingly reacted by implementing a global

model. This highlights that strategy shouldn’t be static, and evolve according to external

factors.

Strategic-fit is key to competitive-advantage because it ensures consistency among

activities, and creates pressures and incentives to enhance operational-efficiency,

consequently making competitive-imitation more difficult. Basically, the main underlying

challenge that both organisations needed to tackle to strengthen their position in CE, was

the creation of coherence and fit between their (internal structure of) headquarters and

subsidiaries. Based on this, both firms’ ‘success’ depends on whether they achieved a right

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fit at the right time by effectively utilising the right resources/capabilities, aligned with their

end goals/objectives too.

Thus long-term visions may exist, but only with the appropriate coordinating and integrating

mechanisms, from top-management to bottom-level employees, can objectives be fully

achieved for long-term success, in both firms.

(Word count: 3298)

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Appendix-1

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Matsushita: Updated Sales and Profitability

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/jessekedy/matsushita3-presentation

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References

BB: Bartlett and Beamish (2011)

Chen, R. and Cannice, M. (2006), ‘‘Global integration and the performance of multinationals’ subsidiaries in emerging markets’’. IVEY Business Journal Online.

Collis, D. J., and Montgomery, B. (1995). Competing on Resources strategy in 1990’s. Harvard Business Review, July-August: 118-128.

Cray, D. (1984) ‘Control and coordination in multinational corporations’, Journal of International Business Studies (15): 85–98.

Fritz, J. (2012). Lucintel Performs Competitive Analysis on Top Five Global Consumer Electronic Companies. Available: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/12/prweb10214635.htm. Last accessed 12th April 2013.

Ghoshal, S. (1987). Global Strategy: An Organizing Framework. Strategic Management Journal. 8 (5), 425-440.

Gupta, A. and Govindarajan, V. (2003). Global Strategy and the Organization. Boston: Wiley. 156-157.

Hill, C.W.L (2007). Global Business Today. USA: McGraw-Hill. 624.

Holt, D (1998). International Management: Text and Cases. USA: Harcourt College Pub. 844.

Johanson, J., & Vahlne, J. (1993). Management of internationalization. In Z. L. Zambou, & A. M. Pettigrew, Perspectives on strategic change. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 43–78

Kedia, B.L., Nordtvedt, R. and Perez, L.M. (2002), ‘‘International business strategies, decision- making theories, and leadership styles: an integrated framework’’, Competitiveness Review. 12 (1), 38-52.

Kogut, B. (1984). ‘‘Normative observations on the value added chain and strategic groups’’, Journal of International Business Studies. 15 (2), 151-68.

Porter, M. (1996). What is strategy?. Harvard Business Review. 1 (1), 62-65.

Bartlett, C.A., Beamish, P.W., 2011, Transnational Management: Text, Readings, and Cases in Cross-Border Management , 6th edition, Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin McGraw-Hill.

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disney-pixar merger a case study analysis

Documents

global models

global integration forces

global competitiveness

hollands philips

organisational structures

competitive cesegment

various strategies

firms goals