When Industry Analysis Goes Flat
Posted: December 27, 2012 Filed under: are you kidding me?, Corporate strategy, current events, economics, law and society, Markets, Vertical integration 1 CommentBarry Lynn, apparently some sort of John Kenneth Galbraith wannabe, has an amusingly cockeyed post over at the Harvard Business Review blog. He seems to think that state regulations protecting local beer distributors from vertically integrated competitors are the font of virtue, preserving needed diversity in the beer market by allowing craft and micro-brewers to get their product delivered. But if the big brewers were legally able (and motivated) to foreclose distribution of the small brands, they would be legally able to do it without vertically integrating into distribution (by requiring exclusivity).
A simpler analysis: When there were many competing major brewers, independent multi-brewer distributors made economic sense, since they eliminated needless duplication of sales and delivery of all those brands to retail establishments. With the consolidation of the beer industry into two giant companies that own all the big brands (and a shift from on-premises to at-home consumption), a single-brewer distribution firm can now internalize almost all those economies. Then the beer industry starts to look a bit more like the soft-drink industry, where two major firms own and develop all the major brands and we don’t blink an eye at their bottler/distributors having exclusive relationships with the upstream brand owners or even being vertically integrated with them. If your local Costco or supermarket won’t carry a micro-brew or an off-brand soda, it’s unlikely to be due to market power on the part of the distributors.
UPDATE: It seems that AB InBev, owner of Budweiser and many other beer brands, is indeed shifting to more of a product innovation strategy and running into distribution problems with these new products:
“That’s not to say that AB InBev has perfected the process. Profit this year was hurt by higher distribution and administration costs in the U.S. as the brewer struggled to keep up with demand for Platinum and Lime-A-Rita, which required extensive — and expensive — countrywide distribution.”
So maybe there are strategic reasons why AB InBev would want more control over its distribution pipeline.
Sleeping With the Enemy Part II
Posted: April 5, 2012 Filed under: Corporate strategy, economics, incentives, networks, Vertical integration 8 CommentsIn an earlier post, I noted Target’s costly decision to end its on-line outsourcing arrangement with Amazon’s cloud service and take all its work in-house. The short-term costs were considerable, both in direct outlays and in performance degradation, and the long-term benefits were hard to pin down. Vague paranoia rather than careful analysis seemed to have driven the decision. I pointed out that firms often seemed unwilling to “sleep with the enemy,” i.e. purchase critical inputs from a direct rival, but the case for such reluctance was weak.
A few months ago, an apparent counterexample popped up. Swatch, the Swiss wristwatch giant, decided unilaterally to cease supplying mechanical watch assemblies to a host of competing domestic brands that are completely dependent on Swatch for these key components. These competitors (including Constant, LVMH, and Chanel) sued, fruitlessly, to force Swatch to continue to sell to them. The Swiss Federal Administrative Court backed up a deal Swatch cut with the Swiss competition authorities that allows Swatch to begin reducing its shipments to rivals. The competition authority will report later this year on how much grace time Swatch’s customers must be given to find new sources of supply, and these customers may appeal to the highest Swiss court. For now, Swatch’s customers are scrambling for alternative sources of supply in order to stay in business. The stakes are especially high because overall business is booming, with lots of demand in Asia.
Vertical Integration and a Teardown Analysis of the iPhone 4S
Posted: November 10, 2011 Filed under: competitive advantage, innovation, technology, theory of the firm, Vertical integration 2 Comments
iPhone 4S Teardown
Last week there was a very useful WSJ article reporting on an analysis of the supplier relationships at the core of the new iPhone 4S (here … while it lasts). This seems like a nice mini-case analysis to see how our theories seem to explain actual outcomes.
They note that Qualcomm “is the big winner” because it is supplying a suite of chips that adds up to $15 per phone. Intel is a loser because it acquired Infineon and then those chips were dropped from the product.
Samsung lost out on the memory chips to its Korean rival Hynix — a surprise since Samsung is known to have a more reliable product. However, interestingly, Samsung did retain its role as the manufacturer of Apple’s proprietary A5 processor which provides the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 with the bulk of its computing power.
StrategyProfs.net 