個案總覽

怡業股份有限公司(簡稱怡業)為一專業的行動裝置配件代工廠商，在事業體快速擴展的過程中，公司的資源幾乎全被代工訂單佔據營收雖佳，但近年來，由於經營成本壓力日益沈重，產業環境也進入成熟期，產業競爭激烈，未來獲利可預見將會下滑，經營風險也逐漸增高。本個案即是探討怡業面對未來，應採取何種經營模式，以達成持續成長的經營目標。

In January 2019, the telecommunications industry was under severe threat of disruption. Telecommunications companies (telcos), which had historically been able to cope with technological disruption by moving from first-generation through to fifth-generation cellular network technologies, were now threatened by digital service providers (DSPs)—firms that came with a new business model that threatened the telcos’ existing business models. Telcos were being forced to deliver only network connectivity, whereas DSPs had positioned themselves to deliver the more lucrative digital services directly to customers. The Norwegian telco Telenor Group (Telenor) decided to take up this battle by offering digital services to end-customers. However, doing so raised several important questions: Was full confrontation with large DSPs inevitable, or was there another way? How could Telenor switch from the old to the new business model? Was it possible to manage two conflicting business models under the same company?

In January 2016, the three partners of CampusHash Technologies LLP (CampusHash), an Indian start-up focused on conducting software training programs, had to make some pressing strategic decisions. CampusHash’s revenues had not grown as expected and the partners had to decide whether to continue with the existing business model or choose to pivot. While pivoting could potentially lead to a significant improvement in CampusHash’s performance, it could also lead to wide-spread organizational change and disruption, risking the survival of the start-up. Despite their constrained resources, the partners had to decide whether to pivot or not in the next two weeks, when they would present a business plan to angel investors to raise much-required funding.

In January 2018, the three founders of Lighting Enhancement Corporation (Lightenco), a Canadian turnkey lighting solutions enterprise, were at a crossroads. After building a successful business enterprise over seven years by relying entirely on internal financial sources, the founders of Lightenco now faced a difficult decision. Energy subsidies from the provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario had underpinned part of Lightenco’s value proposition to customers, but these subsidy schemes were facing imminent termination in both provinces. Moreover, the financing option that Lightenco’s three founders had deployed—relying on internally generated funds and not taking external capital—no longer seemed tenable, and moving to the next level of growth seemed to necessitate new and innovative financing options. Should the founders persist with the bootstrapping that had now become part of their entrepreneurial mindset? Or should they scale the business by either giving up equity or subsuming their operations in a merger with a larger firm? The founders were at a tipping point and had to decide which option to take.

Sun Quan Education Inc. faced a variety of challenges on its path to expanding its customer base and building profitability through the operation of the We-GO club, a strategic business unit aimed at promoting education and training about the Go game in southern Ontario. Some of these challenges came from the low awareness of Go compared to other more popular intellectual products in Canada, the relatively late entry to the market of educational services, and more critically, the need for the company to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan starting with a clearly defined target segment. What was the right direction for the company’s marketing plan?

In May 2017, an associate professor at Balsam State University (Balsam State), was reviewing the most recent evaluations for her fourth-year elective course, Field Forensics. While she knew that the term had not gone particularly well, she was still surprised by the poor ratings her course had received. This associate professor had been teaching at Balsam State for nearly seven years, and her elective course had previously scored well during evaluations. With only a few months to make changes to the course before the fall semester, she needed to glean what insights she could from the course evaluations and determine what changes, if any, she should make to her course.

Located in Bengaluru, India, Xoxoday.com was an online marketplace for experiential gifting. The company started by offering social gifting, and selecting corporations as its target market. In 2013, the company decided to cater to both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets and entered into the niche sector of experiential gifting. The value proposition of the start-up was to provide the best gifting solutions for customers while delivering an experience that would build memories. Heading into 2016, Xoxoday.com aimed to grow by acquiring new customers. It promoted its experiences extensively on social media platforms, but the company’s hard work was not paying off. Xoxoday.com needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to its social media plan in order to attract new customers.

FODY Foods Inc. (Fody) was a Canadian-based entrepreneurial manufacturer and marketer of a line of food products designed for people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a condition that affected an estimated one billion people worldwide. With public awareness of the socially sensitive condition growing, Fody’s founder needed to figure out how to market the company’s line of products while creating a new category in the process.

In January 2018, a senior manager at Labatt Breweries of Canada, headquartered in Toronto, was thinking of how to launch an influencer strategy for the Budweiser brand in Canada. The manager needed a strategy to connect with a group of influential bloggers and other influencers in Canada. These influencers’ opinions affected the way different brands were viewed. Getting the influencers on-side would require finesse as Budweiser was typically seen as different from the new, popular craft-brew brands. Budweiser was the leading beer brand in Canada. It needed to be more relevant to the 18–24 target group, a group that the brand had struggled to reach despite allocating significant marketing dollars to promote its product. The senior manager, who was looking into implementing an influencer marketing campaign, realized that she needed to do some planning regarding how to take into account influencers’ views and preferences.

In February 2018, the co-owners of Trafalgar Ales, Meads & Distillery, based in Oakville, Ontario, were eager to take on a wide range of new opportunities. In the 18 months since their purchase of the brewery, the two co-owners had devoted great efforts to transforming the company, creating and launching several new and successful beer brands. Contract brewing was de-emphasized, and the layout of the brewery was reset. The owners became involved in the industry at the brewers association level. What they needed, it seemed, was a better understanding of the opportunities in front of them. The co-owners had to decide where they should focus their attention and their resources. Their challenge was how to grow the brewery—do more of the same, or launch products in other categories?

AWARD-WINNING CASE - Latin American Business Cases Category, 2019 European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Case Writing Competition. Cinépolis S.A. de C.V. (Cinépolis), an innovative private Mexican firm—and one of the largest movie theatre companies in the world—had developed an over-the-top (OTT) streaming product, KLIC, and launched it in Mexico. But by late 2017, the Mexican OTT market had become competitive and crowded, with Netflix, Claro Video, Blim, Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, and others in the space. KLIC initially faced challenges with finding a proper niche and had not yet achieved profitability. Cinépolis wanted to make the product successful and hoped that interesting synergies between its movie theatre business and the new streaming unit could be found.

In June 2017, the two founders of Nilgai Foods Private Limited reintroduced Cocofly—a fresh, healthy, and pure coconut water—at the lowest price point among competing brands. The initial response to the product when it was first introduced in 2016 was overwhelmingly positive. However, the two founders were concerned in 2017 that Cocofly might be unable to sustain its success for the future. Some important questions were worrying the two founders: How could they avoid the commoditization of their product? How would they differentiate Cocofly from its competitors? Was price differentiation a sustainable strategy? What was the right marketing strategy for a market dominated by unorganized competitors and some early entrants? How should they expand their market across India, especially in the coastal cities of the country, where coconut water was readily available through unorganized companies?

In February 2018, the founder of Toronto-based Mixtape Social was wondering how to grow his business. He had spent the past two years bootstrapping the two-pronged business, which offered services to help professional athletes build their personal brands and creative advertising and social media campaigns for corporations and other entities. With a roster of professional athletes, including Mitch Marner, one of the top players for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, the business had succeeded. Having gained momentum in the last year, the founder thought about how he should map out the next two years: Where should he focus? What services should he offer? How should he position his value proposition?

The director of operations at Canadian Pharmaceutical Distribution Network (CPDN), located in Mississauga, Ontario, had been asked by the company’s president to develop recommendations that would address the growing problem of drug shortages. Managing shortages was taking up a significant amount time, which in turn negatively affected CPDN’s customer service levels and drove up its distribution costs. There were also broader implications for patient care and total costs to the Canadian health care system. It was Friday, January 18, 2019, and the president was expecting to present the director of operations’ recommendations to the board of directors the following month.

In 2016, Toronto entrepreneur Andy Hoang was working to launch a new business, Aviron Interactive Inc., a developer and marketer of interactive rowing machines that would use gamification to allow users to work out with others through a virtual connection and an innovative, remotely-activated resistance adjustor. Hoang wanted to create the new business by wrapping an outsourced services model around a central core that included the key business insight, key differentiating product and technology features, and the leadership of a founding team. The other elements required of a startup—engineering, product design, product development, software coding, testing, quality assurance, marketing, sales, and so on—would be outsourced to various niche suppliers, and the central core would oversee the governance of the supplier portfolio. Hoang knew the company would be competing with similar video-based rowing machines as well as indoor rowing apps. He had a limited budget and wanted to design, develop, and launch the product quickly, to stay ahead of his competition. Would a traditional business model or a lean, agile model be best for this project?

In January 2018, the chief executive officer (CEO) of logistics company Supergroup Limited (Supergroup), considered the ideal weighting of Supergroup’s offshore activities given a weak South African rand and slow growth in the country. The company had nearly become bankrupt in 2009, and the CEO had been hired as the “turnaround” leader who headed its steady recovery, stabilizing the company and building its initiatives toward growth. Now that Supergroup had made a successful recovery, shareholders were asking the CEO whether Supergroup should be focusing its investment strategy outside Africa. The CEO, too, was concerned about the group’s concentration in Africa. Although he and the executive team preferred organic acquisition growth to dividends, they were grappling with the question of what their future focus of acquisitions should be.

Tucker Company Worldwide Inc. (TCW), located in Haddonfield, New Jersey, specialized in providing supply chain logistics solutions to companies in the energy, pharmaceuticals, and food sectors; and to government organizations. On Friday, June 1, 2018, TCW’s president and chief operating officer received a bidding solicitation from a refinery in Reading, Pennsylvania. He tasked his most responsible carrier sales manager with responding to the bid. Both men knew that winning this bid was important for the company and would be a valuable gain. However, the bid needed to be submitted by the end of the day, and the sales manager was challenged with how to effectively showcase TCW's value, address all practical transport options, and remain consistent with the company’s core practices.

In 2017, the president and co-owner of MacKinnon Industries was considering the opportunity to diversify his business and bring a former family business back into the MacKinnon family. With an extensive background in acquiring and managing manufacturing businesses, he now had an opportunity to purchase Corkford Brewery Inc. (Corkford Brewery). The deal included the land, building, and equipment, as well as four successful brands from Tanzer Brewing Company, which owned Corkford Brewery. MacKinnon wanted to evaluate the financial viability of the business venture under three different potential operating scenarios, assess the potential of adding ciders to the product mix, and consider the price that he would be willing to pay to acquire the business.

OpenSky.tv was founded in 2016 with the objective of getting people back to watching video content on television. The founder wanted all video content to be accessible through an Internet connection on the viewer’s television. His company’s platform located and brought together programs and videos that were of interest to each viewer, so viewers could have their own personalized video channel. One full year after its launch, OpenSky.tv wanted to focus on the Cantonese market, and then concentrate on Mandarin and English audiences. The founder was wondering what his platform’s business model should be. How could he achieve his initial objective of creating a business-to-consumer (B2C) recommendation platform?

本個案主要探討台灣的土雞產業鏈及凱馨實業在土雞產業的發展。凱馨董事長為雛雞鑑定師，於1991成立凱馨實業，其營運範疇從產業上游的土雞育種、孵化、飼料配方研發，發展到下游的電宰、分切、熟食產品加工調理。近年來，國內土雞產業面臨消費飲食習慣的改變及傳統通路式微，導致土雞市場萎縮，凱馨實業接班的第二代思考如何因應市場環境變化的挑戰，以雞肉分切打入現代通路市場，發展自有品牌，並進一步擬出未來的發展策略。本個案主要探討這些未來發展策略的作法，以及這些策略在環境及條件前提配合下的可行性。