Vodafone Strategy Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Use Porters five forces model to analyse an industry on the basis of the five competitive forces.
- Analyse the mobile telecommunications industry and how the five forces have affected Vodafone and rival firms and the impact on industry structure, attractiveness, and profitability.
- Understand how Vodafone manages to defend against intense competition and the strategies it uses to create 'blue oceans' that are defensible, helping it capture market share and maintain competitive advantage.
Analyse Vodafone through the lens of Porters five forces to assess how the five forces affect it.
- See also, Vodafone Pestle and Swot Analysis 2019
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Founded in 1982, Vodafone is UK’s third biggest telecommunication provider and a part of Vodafone group, the world’s second largest phone company. Headquartered in Newbury, Vodafone offers a range of telecommunication services including; mobile telecommunication networks offering cellular phones, tablets, mobile internet services, applications among others. The company operates in over 26 countries with at least 444million customers globally and 19.5 million in the UK.
As of 2017, Vodafone’s annual revenue for the three months ending March fell £8.4 billion to £6.9 billion due to the struggling UK telecommunication business (Statista 2018). Never the less its operating profit increased from £3.7billion to £5.1 billion (Yau 2017). Vodafone UK commands 21% market share after BT and O2 with 28% and 26% respectively.