Case Analysis: Foulke Consumer Products: the Southeast Region Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Case Analysis: Foulke Consumer Products: the Southeast Region Case Solution

Decision Problem/Problem Statement

            Foulke Consumer products had a brand license of brand “A”, which the company acquired in 1924. Moreover, the company was a small manufacturer of consumer goods in 1977, but the extraordinary growth and profitability allowed the company to increase its products across the country in only a single decade. However, before expanding into the whole country, the company was serving its goods across four or five states in the country, but tremendous growth and extraordinary profitability ensured a higher market share and huge growth potential for the firm. In addition, the company was selling brand “A”, which was one of the top four brands in the industry. However, the industry was highly competitive and was dominated by almost 10 hot favorite brands that who controlled majority of the market share. Brand “A” of Foulke consumer products inc. was one of them.

            However, the main problem that has been noted from the case is that the industry was highly competitive. Due to extraordinary competition, the growth of the industry was very slow and it was expected that the growth will remain slow due to the entry of many potential competitors in the industry due to its attractiveness. The main reason behind the tremendous growth of the company was that it followed a tremendous track of acquisitioning small brands and competitors, which allowed the company to grow rapidly all over the country. However, the acquisition allowed the company to increase its scope of operations whereas these acquisitions increased the problems of the company as well. Moreover, these problems included redundancies and inefficiencies while the company was also facing profitability issues after sometime of these acquisitions, as the profitability distribution was unequal across the entire range of plants. Furthermore, the company was also unable to fulfill the demand of its products country wide due to inefficiencies.

Decision Alternatives and Evaluation

            Under this section, the analyst used several analysis techniques including the frameworks for analyzing the industry and the company’s position, the analyst also used qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to find out the best solutions to the problems, which the company is currently facing.

            Furthermore, the focus of this section is towards the alignment of the said problems and their respective solutions, which should be fair and easy to implement for the company. In addition, if they are not easy, then they should be practical and realistic so as to follow a more practical approach.

Industry Analysis Using the Porter’s Five Forces

            Under this section, the industry will be analyzed using the following five forces model that was presented by Michael Porter in order to analyze the potency of any industry. (MindTools, Porter's Five Forces , 2015)

  1. Barriers to Entry
  2. Rivalry among the Industry members
  3. Bargaining Power of supplier
  4. Bargaining Power of Buyer
  5. Threat of Substitute

Threat of New Entrant

The threat of new entrant is moderate towards the industry since, the capital requirement is low and any company or an individual can easily start the business since only labor and capital are required to start the business in this industry. Furthermore, economies of scales are needed in order to reduce the fixed cost of production, which is a positive point for the company. However, this factor discourages a new player from entering this arena because the factors that encourage a new player to enter the arena are either moderate or low. In addition, there is no technological protection in the industry since the business can be started by investing a medium amount of capital and there are no patents or copyrights, which an industry player has to purchase. However, the only protection for any invention in the industry is the license that can be brought by biding the right amount.......................

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