Case Background:
Jessica Grant, an analyst with BXE Capital (BXE) that is a money management firm based in Toronto, discussed her U.S. equity mandate with BXE vice president. They tried to identify what changes could be made to BXE's portfolio and to see whether to continue with Apple as a key holding in BXE's fund.
Brief summary of Apple’s history and its development
Apple was found by Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Steve Wozniak in 1976 which the primary core activity was manufacture desktop computers with their in-house develop operation system. After few years of operation, Apple became the leader of private manufacturing personal computers and held its initial public offering in 1980.
However, the entry of IBM affected Apple hardly. In 1983, IBM became the best selling personal computer manufacturers in US, which cannot be stopped by Apple. Worse, Steve Jobs left the company in 1985. Moreover, their retail partners did not want to devote resources for them to display their products at the desire place. The sales of Macintosh computers dropped even worse during the launch of Windows 95. Within ten years of operation, market capitalization of Apple has dropped to $3.1 billion from $11.6 billion.
Although the future of Apple is still unknown in the future, Steve Jobs decided to return to Apple as CEO in 1996. In 1997, Apple partner with Microsoft and launch the Microsoft Office for Macintosh. In 2001, Apple announced that they would open their own retail stores to capture the market share and educate their customers on Apple’s products. Besides, the successful launch of iPod helped Apple to build up a strong financial base, which assists the future development of Apple.
By 2004, Apple starts to provide upfront capital for their suppliers in return of volume commitments with a cheaper price. This move helped Apple to maintain a stable supply and lower the production cost of their products effectively. In 2010, the launch of iPad had reinvented the tablet computer market, its innovative design and multi-functional device make them success in this market. At the same time, 70% of Apple’s products and services are sold directly to their customers. The excellent design, functionality, and marketing effort are the drivers to push Apple toward success in previous decade.
Analyzing 4 different areas of Apple:
Strategy
Apple is adopting a more for more strategy in marketing their products. Different from their competitors, Apple spends a lot resource on its R&D to develop innovative products that way beyond their competitors. This allows Apple to charge more by providing superior products. Keep improving the functionality of the existing products and developing brand new products with heavy marketing effort help Apple to get a lot of supporters.
Supplier
Global suppliers allow apple to minimize the production cost of the products. Besides, Apple also provides upfront support to their suppliers, which helps to build a good relationship with them and ensure a stable supply. Besides, Apple engineers will also work closely with suppliers to update the technology and manufacturing processes with them. However, high-volume orders of Apple allow them to bargain a better price with suppliers, which greatly affect the profit margin of them.
Distribution
Apple looked for innovative ways to speed up the supply chain since the return of Steve Jobs. They started to use airfreight when most firms were still relying on shipments by sea. In 2001, Apple realized it was cheaper to ship directly to customers from assembly plants in China. Apple also relied on intermediate warehouses such as UPS and FedEx and own warehouse to store the inventory according to demand forecast.
Retail
Apple is operating 424 retail stores in 16 countries; their online store is available in 39 countries. In 2010, 70% of Apple products were already sold to customers directly, while their retail partners sold the remaining. Although 70% of sales were made directly, Apple still providing supports to their retail partners. Launching the Apple Premium Reseller Program for retailers that focused on selling Apple products, for example, providing quality Apple fixtures, merchandising materials and other resources.
What differences set APPLE apart from its competitors?
Apple has become the market leader of smartphone and laptop and is having stable growth in recent years. What makes Apple so successful is its strategy of setting itself apart from its competitor.
The major differences between Apple and its major competitor - Samsung:
Apple always has high level of innovation. Unlike many competitors usually copying the launched products in market, they create new products for the market, for instance, the iWatch - integrating smart phone into fashionable watch, MacBook Air - the thinnest laptop etc. This makes Apple driving the innovation and trend of the whole industry and not affected by the competitors. Also, Apple sustains a short new product development cycle that results in keeping abreast of the ever-changing customers’ needs for gadgets and avoid easily being obsolete. To maintain their high level of innovation, Apple typically invested heavily in research and development and conduct frequent market researches.
What are the challenges that Apple faces in the future?
Technology challenge
The IOS system keeps updated frequently, yet there are not great changes in terms of the functions or hardware of iPhones. Moreover, the model, SE launched this year is more or less similar to the iPhone 6s.
Leadership challenge
The transition of management from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook cloud uncertainty to Apple. Lacking of a leader with a strong vision, who new the market well. Investors may lose confidence towards Apple, leading to the sales drop. Moreover, the products introduced by Cook are proven not as innovative as before.
Competition challenges
Apple faces strong competitor, Samsung where it launched over 30 models every year with lower cost and various design whereas Apple only introduces very few models of iPhone per year. The potential market may be captured by its competitors such as LG, Samsung. Apart from these two, there are emergence of new local brands in China, such as XiaoMi, Meizu. The selling points of these phones are that they are lower cost while the functions are satisfactory. Apple may lose a portion of China market which it emphasized.
Mass Production challenge
In order to have massive production at a lower cost, Apple manufacture its products in Foxconn which is in China. Apple has been criticized for using sweatshop labor and squeeze their profits. Sometimes there are sudden increased in Apple products, and the workers have to work overtime without extra pay. The working condition in Foxconn is poor also. It adversely affect the image of Apple.
What are the implications for its supply chain?
Addressing labor issue
Since the news that negative working condition on suppliers’ factory and warehouse which Apple outsourced go viral, criticism over Apple’s indifferent attitude towards labor rise. Unless Apple undertakes remedy measures, Apple image, in the regard of labor treatment, will be compromised.
Fierce Competition
Facing such fierce competition in the market among other brands such as Samsung, it urges Apple to be responsive to the market demands by utilizing third party’s logistics companies and express companies. It would enhance the efficiency of delivery and improve customer satisfaction
Procurement:
To avoid the over reliance of single supplier, Apple need to seek alternate supplier to diversify supply chain risk. The increasing design complexities from the cheaper iPhone changes the supply chain. Addition new suppliers will provide a greater flexibility and Apple can react faster to supply chain disruption. There also indicates that Apple’s move has to be faster than before, making an early exclusive deal with selected suppliers of major components in exchange for greater volume.
New Product development
Given the electronic gadget market becoming fiercer, instability in market escalates. Inputs on demand forecast and R&D are critical in the near future, making sure that there is adequate production capacity and placing accurate volume pre-orders with suppliers and that new products / product lines should feature cutting-edge technology that others in the market cannot imitate in short term in order to pre-occupy untapped market share.
Diversification of supply chain partners
As the width and depth of product mix (service mix) of Apple are enlarged, Apple is required to minimise the risks of shortages of needed components or other vendor issues that can deter, or even stop, the production. To achieve this, Apple is necessary to broaden its manufacturing partner base. On one hand, this move can reduce the reliance on single or few suppliers when problems of the suppliers appear. On the other hand, it expedites the competition among Apple potential suppliers for further business with Apple, and therefore Apple likely secure better quality products with higher discount.
As Jessica Grant, what recommendations would you make to the company’s VP? Explain.
According to stock price of Apple stock, Apple stock has been seeing a steady growth over the past five years, despite mild fluctuation. As a corporate with abundant capital, it is worth setting aside part of capital, investing in Apple.
In addition, news from known and unknown sources hinted that the upcoming iPhone 7 are characterized by a number of brand-new features, coupled with additional services and peripherals.
Reflection
Managing the global supply chain effectively is always challenging to every organization, which can be a huge different to their profitability when the organization can manage their supply chain greatly. Besides of bargaining to suppliers, Apple also provide different kinds of support to them. For example, financing the machineries needed for mass production that fulfill the needs of Apple. Globalization allow Apple to find suppliers to supply different parts of the products with lower price. Although it can highly reduce the product cost of Apple, they are facing competition from companies all over the world. Many companies are using the same suppliers, for example, Intel will supply the central processing unit(CPU) to many companies, so some company may have to wait for a period of time to get what they need as the capability of Intel is limited. Building good relationship with suppliers may help ensure the supply of core parts of the products, which can also temporarily reduce the level of competition of the market due to competitors’ lack of core components as they’ll have to wait for the supply.
After reading this case, we realized that managing the bullwhip effect effectively can help to boost the supply chain performance greatly because bullwhip effect is a main problem that cause the supply chain ineffective. In normal case, because of insufficient information, suppliers will reserve more inventory for the swings of the demand to prevent any loss due to stock out, this problem will increase as it moves upward from the supply chain. Apple have managed this problem effectively to ensure the supply chain efficient. After providing the forecasting data to the suppliers, Apple will keep on adjusting the forecast data to suppliers in order to give them the most accurate forecast data. This action ensure Apple can get sufficient supply, also reduce cost of holding excessive inventories of their suppliers, thus, increase the supply chain efficiency.
Reference:
Mark. K. (2014). Apple INC.: Managing a Global Supply Chain. Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation. Retrieved on 12 April, 2016.