ROLLS ROYCE HOLDINGS PLC

Rolls Royce Holdings Plc Success Story

Rolls Royce Holdings Plc Success Story

Introduction

Rolls-Royce is one of the most well recognized brands around the world. The asset value of the brand name is immense. Rolls-Royce is world leading conglomerate of power solutions providing its products and services to aerospace, marine and energy markets. Today as it stands, Rolls-Royce stands world's second largest in civil aero engine company, second largest in defence aero engine company, one of the leading company in marine propulsion and leading in the supply of energy solutions. Rolls Royce business is spread around 135 different countries with manufacturing plants in 14 different countries. They employee more than 40,000 people in various fields ranging from civil and defence aerospace, energy sector and marine markets (www.rolls-royce.com). The engines of Rolls Royce can be found in all kinds of commericial aircrafts around the worlds, which are being used by the giants of aviation industry (Airbus Industries and Boeing). Globally, Rolls Royce brand is known for its prestige, and for its high end quality, reliable product.

Discussion

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Rolls Royce plc has remained the backbone for the turbofan engine industry. The company has had its troubled past, with financial problems and lack of strategic leadership, and the added burden of the failure of international success of British companies in the past. Rolls-Royce plc seems has found the success formula and its RB211 family have engines have lead the race and has placed the company in the top three in high-thrust turbofan market, among Pratt & Whitney and General Electric Aircraft Engines. The competitive advantage that Rolls Royce holds over its competitors is the technology of “three-shaft” design of its RB211 (www.rolls-royce.com).

The success of RB211 has it history. When the project for the development of RB211 had started for the Lockheed L-1011 jumbo jet, Roll Royce ran short of funds and went bankrupt. The company was nationalized under the government of Labour and Tory. Through the years 1970 to 1987, investments were sustained and continue their development of RB211. In the year 1987, Rolls-Royce went private and since then they have been operating as a public listed corporation. They first started to taste their success in the market in the late 1990s and 2000s, as they surpassed Pratt Whitney as the second largest aircraft company. Rolls Royce plc success story gives us an opportunity to learn how a company involved in high-tech products and innovation process contained themselves, not letting themselves down with the rapid changes in the corporate ownership, and coming out in flying colours. This paper studies the ultimate success of Rolls Royce and how they used their abilities and exercised strategic management to become a leading company (Lazonick & Prencipe, n.d., 1-4).

The success of the RB211 must be accredited to the hard work put in by company's engineer, their involvement in the strategic decision making and in decision making process of resource allocation. The careers of these engineers were on the line and ...