Corporate Level Strategy & Competitive Environment Analysis for Wesfarmers Sbus - Case Study Example

The paper "Corporate Level Strategy & Competitive Environment Analysis for Wesfarmers Sbus" is a great example of a business case study. The focus of this paper is on examining the competitive environment and corporate level strategies adopted by Wesfarmers in conducting its business through its current strategic business units. In doing so, the report bases its arguments upon the strategies adopted by each of these strategic business units.

Since its inception in 1914, as notable Western Australian framer’s cooperative, Wesfarmers has succeeded in growing into one of the country’s largest publicly listed companies in terms of revenues and employment-base. Having its headquarters in Western Australia, the firm has continued to engage in diversified business operations that extend to such sub-entities as supermarkets, liquor stores, hotels and convenience stores; office supplies and, industrial divisions. It is important to note that Wesfarmers is Australia’s largest private-sector employer with more than 220,000 employees and, also enjoys the shareholder base of more than 530,000 people.

Diagram of Wesfarmers to its SBU’s

Subsidiaries

2.0 Sustainable Competitive Advantage

2.1 Literature Review

The term sustainable advantage is not necessarily used to refer to a specific set of the period nor does it indicate that advantages would occur indefinitely rather; it is focused on ascertaining the extent for which there would be competitive duplication (Kumar et al, 2011). In assuming an effective sustainable competitive advantage, the internal level of resources of a company should not be made easily available to a rival that possesses the imminent potential to formulate superior competitive advantage as opposed to environmental factors that are far-much available to all other potential rivals. In addition to such aspects as well-integrated knowledge, organisational culture and history; it is further argued that competitive advantage also involves a specific set of formal rules and structures that are used in governing the manner for which people would normally relate and the company’s immediate culture and history as a crucial point of success (McWilliams & Siegel, 2011). In essence, the notion of sustainable competitive advantage is deemed to be aligned towards the frameworks relating to durability; mobility as well as replicability. For this case, durability is considered to be a measure of the underlying capacity and resilience for which a company possess in order to push away potential imitation from rivals. Mobility relates to the extent for which the underlying level of resources can be effectively transferred amongst the different set of rivals while replicability ascertains the ease with which these resources can be imitated by competitors (King, 2007). Following this line of reasoning, Kazlauskaite and Buciuniene (2008) note that sustainable competitive advantage; is indeed prolonged sustenance of a distinct value-creating and providing a strategy that cannot be imitated or even implemented concurrently by a given current competing firm.

It is important to note that an efficient sustainable competitive advantage emanates from a dynamic interplay that exists between an organisation and its immediate external environment (Pacheco-de-Almeida & Zemsky, 2007). Thus, sustainable is considered to be more accessible in industries that enjoy more than a single dominant strategy since rivals might not be in a position to replicate similar options as the incumbent organisation. There has been a successful perspective allowed to define the concept of sustainable competitive advantage that include; a structural approach that is based on industrial organisation economics; resource-based view(RBV) of a given organisation; the conventional IO economics and game theory. Consequently, there has been further added to these theories that include the dynamic capability view and the Blue Ocean strategy (Markley & Davis, 2007). It is crucial to note that in defining and specifying the fundamental approaches used on ascertaining competitive advantage, most of the aforementioned views will focus on restricting a company into comprehending the overall nature of full dynamism related to the given strategy (Markley & Davis, 2007). A resource-based view is solely focused on the formulation of competitiveness for the futures while still the other's perspective is directed towards the current deployment of resources that were previously developed.