How well does our system work? You can use the numerical index to check our blogs from the last big recession.
Much of the world suffered a severe recession from 2008 to 2011. During that time, we wrote more than 250 blogs using publicly available information and our Strategystreet system to project what would happen in various companies and industries who were living in those hostile environments. In 2022, we began to update each of these blogs to see what later took place and to check the quality of our conclusions. To date, we have completed the first 175 of our original blogs. You can use these updated blogs to see how well the Strategystreet system works.
Even high-end brands can offer lower-end products. We call the high-end companies and products Performance Leaders. These companies and products offer better performance than the Standard Leader products in an industry for prices starting at least 10% over the Standard Leader product prices. Price Leader competitors are those companies who offer less performance than the Standard Leaders products for prices generally starting about 25% below those of the Standard Leader. Even Performance Leader brands can offer Price Leader type of products. These Price Leader products are high-end products with significant discounts to the normal high-end…
Read MoreHeico Corporation is a Predator, a low end competitor. In our research, we have found that there are four types of low-end competitors. They differ from one another in the benefits they offer, compared to the industry-leading products, either to the user or to the buyer of the product. We call the industry-leading companies and products Standard Leaders. See HERE for short audio description of the four low-end competitors. Heico Corporation is a Predator type low-end competitor. Compared to the industry Standard Leader product, it offers the same benefits to the user of the product…
Read MoreLow-end competitors don’t think like industry Standard Leaders. As a result, they often blow big holes in the leader’s plans. For twenty-five years, from the early 70s until the late 90s, the color television manufacturing market was one of the worst places on Earth to compete. Those companies who did survive, and there weren’t many, became hard-bitten competitors with no illusions about the inevitability of success of even the largest companies. The two largest U.S. competitors, RCA and Zenith, are now nearly-forgotten names. GE was another titan victim of the inexorable pressure of intense price-based…
Read MoreOne of your competitors may be a low-end player today. If that competitor stays at the low end, the likelihood is that its share of the market will not exceed 15%, even if it is quite successful. However, that very success may breed a significant challenge to industry leaders in the future. If the low-end competitor is earning a good return on investment, it may enter the market for the industry’s higher-end products in order to enhance its own profits and future. The pharmaceutical industry offers a current example of the phenomenon of a low-end…
Read MoreGarmin is having big trouble these days. As one of the leaders in the personal-navigational device business, Garmin is besieged by much larger competitors from an adjacent industry. In particular, the cell phone hand set makers are doing the same thing to GPS functions that they did to the PDA market a few years ago. They are turning GPS into one of the functions on smart phones. In 2007, 18% of mobile phones already had the GPS function embedded in them. That percentage may double within a couple of years. But Garmin has come with…
Read MoreThe North American auto market has turned ugly. Normally, analysts expect the industry to sell about sixteen million vehicles a year, about what we sold in 2007. We seem to be on track to sell around fifteen million in 2008. Today GM, Ford and Chrysler are all losing money in the North American market. This is a market that we would define as Hostile. A Hostile market is an industry with low industry-average returns on investment for the majority of the industry’s competitors. Hostility is the result either of a fall in demand or of…
Read MoreGoogle has entered Microsoft’s most treasured domain, the office suite. Google offers its Apps for free. Using these Apps, a consumer may prepare basic reports and spreadsheets. Google claims two advantages over Microsoft with its Apps product: it operates on the internet, and it is free or very inexpensive in its premium version. So, what might be the outlook be for both Google and Microsoft? Microsoft has to worry, but not too much at this stage of the game. Over the last few years, we have analyzed several hundred low-end competitors entering a market against…
Read MoreRemember the grade school experience when you learned of a party to which you did not receive an invitation? For most of us, that was a hurtful experience. But the failure to receive an invitation can cost real money in the business world, both now and in the future. In our research, we have found that there are two sources of failure when a new piece of business becomes available. The first is an invitation failure. A company did not get invited to bid. The second is evaluation failure. A company is invited to bid…
Read MoreDelta recently announced that it was trimming its domestic capacity and shifting that capacity to international flights. It will cut its domestic capacity by about 5%, which will bring its capacity in August of 2008 to a level 10% below that of one year earlier. United Airlines did something similar earlier in the year. In the short term, this will help these two legacy airlines’ margins because international passengers pay more per available seat mile than do domestic passengers. In the long term, the benefits are considerably less clear because of the encouragement these moves…
Read MoreBear Stearns is gone. The explanation is in my old neighborhood. Recently I had the time to visit my old neighborhood in New York, a typical set of brownstones on the upper east side of Manhattan. I lived there for two years nearly forty years ago. When I returned there, I entered a sort of time warp. Most of the buildings looked the same. The streets looked the same. The cars, if I ignore make and slightly smaller shapes, looked very similar. The laundromat I used still resides on the corner. Across the street was…
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