Dell: Can Rivals Beat Its Strategy?

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,3, University of applied sciences, Munich, language: English, abstract: Today Dell is a huge global player in the information technology (IT) industry and offers a wide product range from personal computers (PC), notebooks, monitors, printers, scanner, plasma and LCD TVs, projectors, storage and server systems. Dell provides their products and services for individual customers and businesses. Over the last years Dell had enormous grow rates and could compete their competitors. But the international competition becomes stronger today and Dell has to stand against different competitors in all business segments. Can Dell therefore continue its success story and beat its competition? This assignment tries to present an answer. In this assignment the internal and external factors which are effecting Dell's business are analyzed. Further the leadership qualities of Michael Dell and Dell's strategy will be evaluated. In addition Dell's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, the competitive environment and the financial performance will be analysed to come up with the development of a suitable strategy to help the company to improve its strengths and to beat out the competition. Dell's position in the competitive environment was evaluated and it was shown that Dell has all possibilities to beat out its competition. Dell exhibited an outstanding financial performance over the period of 1998-2006. For the future Dell should apply following strategies: continuously improvement of existing core elements to keep the competitive advantage; try other distribution channels to reach broader customer base; the development and product innovation in PC, server and storage area needs to be pushed to be competitive; Dell should intensify the strategic alliances further and should try to boost acquisition of small companies or rivals to strengthen competitive capability; expansion of the service group should be pursued and Dell should look for possibilities to optimize the two manufacturing plants in China to gain market share and revenue increase.