Professor Polakoff Case

Simranjit Dhillon

Professor Polakoff

MBA 6360

March 17, 2013

Financial Analysis

One management's trustiest tools is the SWOT analysis. You take a calm, cool look at the organization's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Then you seek to capitalize on the Strengths, eliminate the Weaknesses, seize the best Opportunities and counter the Threats. I would like to focus on HP's competitors Strengths.

IBM led in every important market of the time; mainframes, communications, mainframe storage, minicomputers, and personal computers. It earned more profit than the next nine computer firms generated in total sales, spending more on R&D than they made in earnings. IBM's had earned 86 billion dollars by mid 1997. Founded in 1924, The computing tabulating recording company adopted the name International Business Machines Corporation. IBM has been involved in many technological advances from tabulating countries' census reports to sporting event analysis to developing computer software and e-business.

Compaq Computers during the 1980s was a leader in the computer hardware industry. Its name became big with cutting edge, high quality, products that sold for a premium. The strength of Compaq was its research and development driven organization that has out performed its rival including the much larger IBM by being leader in creating state of the art computers for its customers. Compaq was able to sustain strong market maintenance and development of new markets which led to them having a big market share. All of these helped them gain and keep a strong stable client base.

I believe that Dell's most important strength is the Direct Model approach. This strategy has allowed them to achieve stellar status. This allows them to interact with customers directly providing them with fast, reasonably priced and friendly means of production and distribution. The Direct Model approach really makes the the process of ordering computers whether its for corporate or institutional customers much more easier. The strategic method also provides other forms of products and services such as internet and telephone purchasing, customized computer systems; phone and online technical support and next day on site product service.

To me the deal between Compaq and HP will not help HP strategically in handling IBM's breadth or Dell Computer's more powerful direct sales model. As we all know now that the deal is done that the immediate quarters after the finalization of the deal that HP's revenue has fallen more than the company had anticipated. During the first few years HP had failed to see the consistent progress that it had hope for pre-merger, the company did not implode. I believe that the merger was more on the upside for Compaq than it was for HP. HP was and is a sprawling global company, it products and services range from handheld devices,