Tsingtao Brewery: Digital Transformation Road To "Lighthouse Factory"

This case study focuses on the digital transformation strategy of Tsingtao Brewery in the Chinese beer market. Tsingtao Brewery is one of the oldest and most famous beer brands in China. However, this legacy brewery company also faces challenges, such as fierce competition, slow market growth, and consumption upgrading. To respond to the changes of consumer demand and industry competition, Tsingtao Brewery accelerates its digital end-to-end supply chain in various aspects, such as procurement, production, logistics, and marketing. During its digital transformation, did Tsingtao Brewery choose outsourcing digital technologies, applying the Blue Ocean Strategy, or centralizing its organization? These dilemmas were awaiting answers.

This case may be used in classes for executive master’s in business administration, master’s in business administration, or business graduate students. The case is also suitable for training programs for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and other enterprise executives. This case is also applicable to related courses, such as strategic management, digital management, or information technology management. The case involves more theoretical knowledge, so it can be taught as a comprehensive case of the strategy course. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following: <ul><li>Analyze the external and internal factors that affect a company’s decision to adopt a digital strategy.</li><li>Apply relevant frameworks and metrics to measure the financial performance and the impacts on supply chain under the digital transformation strategy (for example, use both financial and non-financial indicators to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of company’s activities, such as revenue growth, market share, lead time on production, minimum order size, accuracy of demand forecasting and innovation capability).</li><li>Discuss the challenging decisions in the digital transformation.</li><li>Analyze a business model and understand how company’s digital strategy can change its value proposition, value creation, and value capture.</li><li>Analyze the challenges and risks of adopting a digital strategy (identify and analyze the potential difficulties that a company would encounter during its digital transformation).</li></ul>

• digital strategy
• digital supply chain