- Level: University Degree
- Subject: Business and Administrative studies
- Word count: 1835
Strategic management of British Airways
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Introduction
Transfer-Encoding: chunked 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1.1 British Airways- Company Overview British Airways Plc is the largest scheduled airline at international level in the United Kingdom. British airways (BA) operate its services in scheduled airway transportation services, domestic and international carriage of mail and freight and miscellaneous ancillary services (Datamonitor, 2013). With more than 300 destination flights, BA works in collaboration with franchise partners and codeshare to carry around 34 million passengers in a year. The annual report suggests its yearly revenue as 8.99 billion pounds and also boosts about having largest employee count in the UK with approximately 42,655 people. BA became private in the year 1987 and since then, it continued to rise against the fierce competition in the airways industry. BA is successfully identified as the airlines who adapted to green technology and for its valuable environmental friendly strategic decisions. BA was greatly affected by the economic collapse in 2008 which affected it marginally in terms of revenue generated. Strategic analysis of BA suggests that there is lot of scope for it to grow in Europe and in the world market. Annual reports of British airways stresses that the company would strive hard strategically to become the world?s most responsible airline. In order to strive for its strategic objective, careful strategic decision will be required to be implemented. ...read more.
Middle
In addition, focus involves the need to offer a service or a product which serves the niche market, which has little competition in a distinct manner. The focus strategy is again differentiated into differentiation focus and cost focus where the companies decide either on minimisation of the costs for their services or products in the market or to differentiate a service or product in a market that is focussed to receive them. Cost leadership strategy allows BA to create the services to be cheaper than that of the competitor in order to gain advantage over its competitors in the market. Porter?s generic strategies form an important way for BA to design its strategic management exercise. It is however not a fool proof method and is realistically impossible for BA to focus only on one aspect described above. The reason for which it cannot adapt to these strategies is that when a company follows this strategy, attempts will be made to differentiate products and services, whereby competitive advantage can be gained over their competitors but as this is consumer driven industry, BA cannot focus only on differentiation strategy by ignoring cost leadership strategy. This is because the cost leadership strategies are essential to reduce costs of the services, a primary attribute which the consumers consider while considering the services, no matter how unique these products are. ...read more.
Conclusion
The main resource which the company has a successful edge of addition when compared to its rivals is the utilisation of the remodelling services, whereby BA can achieve diversification in to other forms of transport markets also, while maintaining the cost effectiveness. Weakness ? Opportunities Within BA, change is recommended to be brought about by managing people, managing employees in particular. The leaders for the company should be chosen in such a way that they are more adaptable to transformational styles of leadership and can adapt their leadership style to current fierce competition. There have been many incidents of poor relationship between employees in the past which has been witnessed by the news paper incidents and this relations history can be countered through improved people process management where people working in the company are treated at personal level. In addition, recommendations should be made to improve technological services in order to adapt more towards innovation and technological change. Use of technology will help BA to address the issues concerned to growth, customer relationships and pricing in more affective way with increased trust and reliability. Weakness ? Threats There are some strategies which can be implemented in such a way that the weaknesses of BA will not become threats nor harm the company?s growth. One such strategy is to remodel and renovate the environmental stance of the company which can help to reduce the negativity which arouse from increased environmental damage. ...read more.
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