Strategic Management Plan for Sear's Holding Company - Term Paper Example

Sears Roebuck & Company was planned to enter into a merger with Kmart by Edward Lampert who worked as a hedge-fund manager. The merger was initiated with the aim to intensify the existence of Sears and create Sears Holding Corporation. However, the financial position of Sears Holding Corporation seemed to be worsening post merger along with a drop in their share prices. The company was learnt to be over burdened with debt. A drop was also experienced in the volume of sales of the company. Owing to all these reasons, the company was facing a huge dip in its share prices.

To add more, the adjusted earnings of the company were predicted to drop considerably along with a cash crisis. The company had also failed to make payments for its respective credit lines (Laing, 2011). The waning sales, over expending on restructuring the stores, poor merchandising and unwise micromanaging was suffered by the company due to which the share price of the company was estimated to witness a decline by around 50%. As per the Fitch ratings, the company was ranked in the junk territory in terms of its debt.

Furthermore, the liquidity of the company was expected to remain insufficient in the year 2012, in case the company fails to exploit the markets for fresh cash. On the other hand, the company was stated to hold a considerable share of inventory along with a significant portfolio of the possessed real estate which ranged from $8 billion to $10 billion. However, the worth of the real estate which was chiefly situated at the Borders was required to be ascertained. Therefore, with the aim to avoid such insufficiency of funds, the company is required to set an appropriate strategic management plan which would assist the company to a significant extent to overcome its serious financial crunch by bringing in fresh funds (Laing, 2011).

The fresh strategic management plan for the company should entail few considerable alterations in its stores by getting rid of the entire soft-line inventories for the reason of enhancing the sales. The soft-line inventories would entail the poorly performing shoes, jewelry and apparel which have been believed and observed to lack the ability of appealing to the customers in the arena of soft-lines. Hence, it is required for the company to amalgamate few of the outstanding part of the inventory with the offerings of Kmart (Albrecht, Brainard, Fadgen, Jackson & Sengbusch, 2009).

The company should also focus on expanding few of its product lines such as the kitchen appliances and dining furnitures. The company should also undertake necessary steps to intensify the advertising activities related to the electronic products that are offered. The mentioned alterations along with the additions would prove to be sufficient to replace the soft-lines products to a significant extent. The company should also try and shift its concentration on catalogue & internet retail, automotive repair, consumer appliances as well as electronics retail and supply of building material in order to diversify and attain competitive advantage.

In order to strengthen the defensive walls of the company, it needs to consider the options of entering into a few selected partnerships with certain companies, particularly in the field of automotive care (Albrecht, Brainard, Fadgen, Jackson & Sengbusch, 2009). To augment the demand of the amended platform or array of products as well as services, the company requires shifting its degree of emphasis to the adults of the middle class varying from 25 years to 64 years as this particular age group is considered to hold the