APPLE INC.

Company Assessment: Apple Inc.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION1

APPLE INC- BRIEF COMPANY OVERVIEW1

STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT2

Apple's mission statement2

External Environmental Analysis2

Porter's Five Forces3

Threat of New Entrants3

Rivalry among Competitors3

Bargaining Power of Buyers3

Bargaining Power of Suppliers3

Substitute Products4

Trends in the Industry4

Internal Environment Assessment4

McKinsey's 7 S Model5

Shared Values5

Style5

Staff5

Skills6

Structure6

Systems7

Strategy7

Functional strategies7

Business strategies8

Corporate level strategies8

Horizontal Integration8

Vertical Integration9

Diversification9

ORGANIZATIONAL ASSESSMENT9

SWOT Analysis10

Balanced Scorecard11

Recommended Strategy12

REFERENCES13

Company Assessment: Apple Inc.

Introduction

Being the first one to;

Invent a pointing device known as mouse,

Invent 3.5” floppy disk and CD ROM

Deliver attractive looking yet very fast and powerful computer machines

All these and many more are undoubtedly the remarkable inventions which will be associated with Apple Inc. for all the times to come. The objective of this report is to comprehensively present strategic assessment of Apple Inc. The tools employed for assessing the strategic performance of the company primarily include; McKinsey's 7 S Model, Porter's five forces Model, and Balanced Scorecard approach. The scheme of the report is such that it analyzes the company's vision and mission statement, carries out the company's external followed by internal environment assessment, analyses its current strategies. The report concludes by highlighting the company's SWOT and provides corresponding recommendations.

Apple Inc- Brief company overview

Apple Inc is primarily engaged in the designing, developing, and marketing of personal computers, communication devices, and portable digital music players. The company is also involved in selling of various software, computer peripherals, network solution services, and third party digital applications. Apple's headquarter is in Cupertino, California; it employs over 60,400 people as full time, whereas 2,900 as part time workers as of December 2011. It has 357 stores in 11 countries worldwide. Its operations are demarcated on the basis of product lines; consisting of 9 divisions; namely, iPhone and related services and products, iPad and related services and products, iPod, Desktop computers, laptops, music related services and products, software services, computer/devices peripherals, and hardware (Market Line, 2012).

The company's dynamic history is characterized by the efforts and vision of one man- the incredible Steve Jobs (1955-2011). The company which began as a small computer manufacturer has diversified impeccably. As of 2011, Mac's market share in the global PC market was 23%, iPhone's share grew by 74% to become 5% in the global mobile devices market, iPod enjoys 78% of the global market share of digital music devices (Wroblewski, 2011). With such market leaderhip, the company was able to register an increase of 66% in its revenue for FY2011 at $108,249m. Its sound management was able to effectively transform the increase in revenue into 83% rise in operating profit, consequently its net profit of $25,922m showed an increment of 85% during FY2011 (Yahoo Finance, 2012).

Strategic Assessment

Apple's mission statement

Apple does not have an established mission statement because they believe that it might hinder their flexibility and creativity; however, they usually end their press releases with the following statement which can be regarded as their traditional mission statement.

“Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the ...