Apple Company is one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers of various kinds, media devices, music players and related software, digital content, and applications.
The list of products manufactured and marketed by Apple includes such personal portable devices as iPod and iPad, different laptops and personal computers, Apple TV, the famous iPhone, Mac operating system and several consumer and professional applications. The company’s products are sold all around the world through online stores, specialized Apple stores, wholesales, and value-added resellers. Apple’s net income for 2010 counts over sixty-five million dollars (Wheelen, Hunger, 500).
The company is determined to provide the best user experience to its customers through the development of its unique devices and software.
The company’s business strategy is based on Apple’s ability to design a series of devices, software, and applications that are compatible with each other and create a sufficient system and user interface granting customer loyalty to the company and allowing it to be a part of several highly competitive markets at a time.
This is Apple’s main winning strategy that allowed the company to be ultimately preferred among people that had at least one of their products (Montgomery, 50).
Apple board of directors includes eight members. The founders of the company were Jobs and Wozniak. After several years they both left the company and stopped being its board members.
Jobs replaced himself with Sculley, under whose influence Apple became one of the world’s biggest personal computer marketer in 1990s, but soon as a result of Sculley’s bad strategy Apple it experienced a downfall of sales and growing competition from the side of Microsoft (Rumelt, 40). At the end of 1990s Jobs again became the CEO of Apple. His focus was to make the devices of the new generation. This desire became the basis of his winning strategy for Apple.
Apple is a company oriented at education promotion and generates products making the learning process easier, assisting both students and teachers, making their interactions more effective and convenient. Apple is an international corporation, its retail stores are located all over the world and its customers belong to various countries and cultures.
The company creates products for such spheres as government, education, science, enterprise, and consumption. By 2010 the company had forty-six thousand and six hundred full-time employees and two thousand and eight hundred temporary employees all around the world.
The main strength of Apple was its participation in several highly competitive markets and granting its customer loyalty. Besides, Apple has a strong brand reputation and its retail stores create a significant financial performance.
The company’s weaknesses are the high prices for its goods, the decrease of the market share, malfunction of the new products, limited operational compatibility of the products. The opportunities for Apple are high demand for new goods, market growth, the launch of new concepts, acquisition of patents. Threats are technological changes, the strength of the competitor products, growth of taxes.
One of the latest implementations for the company is its concern about Apple’s dependency on Jobs. The current CEO of Apple Cook had two alternatives. He either had to sell Apple while its performance was still strong or to take a risk and continue to develop the company without its main visionary.
Apple’s way of controlling its revenues and successful performance was the creation of the blue ocean through the unification of several products and making the consumers choose more Apple products as soon as they got one. This strategy also served as a strong promotion technique. Gradually Apple launched more and more products, knowing that all of them will be popular among the customers bound to purchase only Apple products.
Works Cited
Montgomery, Cynthia A. The Strategist. New York: Harvard Business School, n. d. Print.
Rumelt, Richard P. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. New York: Crown Business, 2011. Print.
Wheelen, Thomas and David Hunger. Strategic Management and Business Policy. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2012. Print.