Case Study Vodafone

Case study Vodafone

1) In the first years of 2000 the fixed-line telephone situation in UK was declining because always more people were abandoning this “old” technology in favor of mobile technology.

So the government to encourage the competition and the sector required British Telecom to offer others operator wholesale service through its network. So analysing this sector with porter’s five we could say that this industry could be attractive only for the companies that already has a large know-how of the matter or eventually companies that could obtain this knowledge borrowing the know-how in license from more specialized industries.

Talking about mobile technology we consider a market that in those years was super-quickly evolving and becoming always more crowded of competitors that tries to steal market share to the biggest companies with many difficults to emerge because this market is becoming always more an oligopoly lead by the couple (Apple-Samsung). So the threat of new entrants and substitute products is relatively low because the most consolidate mobile brands have the tools and the technology to maintain in every case a huge slice of market shares.

Television service in UK is dominated by the five “public service broadcast” channels and BBC is the market leader in this sector, next to other channels like BSkyB, Viacom, virgin that are largerly supported by a mix of subscription and advertising. In 2011 the sector had a lost of viewers in the primary channels although tv operators spent 5.5 billon dollars in that year for content. So in the porter’s framework this sector is not so stormy for the companies because the few main TV companies are practically always the same even if some smaller tv companies could steal viewer and share introducing new attractive programmes and a wrong investment in this sector could be lead to a disaster in terms of lack revenue.

Broadband internet is still a sector in continue developing and redefinition because the run the create always faster internet connection is probably endless. The threat of new providers and new entrants is high such as the bargaining power of the clients and probably also of the suppliers so this is a very complex sector that is changing and evolving at a unbelievable speed and could arrive in very unknown and unespected way.

2) Key drivers in this complex sector as communication industry is, could be partnership, agreement or merging between companies to develop or create new kind of business or new market sectors or simply similar product or process to the existing ones but in more sustainable, efficient and quick way. A key driver could be the exclusive owning of some patent or license that allow for example a company to product unique product and unique service or make money by the royalties giving in license this exclusive know how. Key drivers could also be some government policy or regulations to enhance and improve this market and the way it works also with big investments for finance some innovative projects. The impact of these key drivers is difficult to say but we can imagine a general and continue improvement of the communication technologies making always easier and faster the way to communicate in the world.

3) Make forecast for the future in a sector like this is surely risked and unlikely but we can say that in the next 3-5 years the UK communication market will go always more in the direction of wireless technology with high speed and wide range to make always more people connected in many different