CANON Inc. Any chance to beat its global competitors? (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2.0, University of applied sciences, Munich, course: Corporate Strategic Management, language: English, abstract: Canon's strategies have been very effective in balancing growth of market share and profitability of the company by controlling a significant share of focused niche markets in the imaging industry. Canon's strategic challenges in-volved identifying the markets in which it intended to compete and developing competitive advantages to allow the firm to balance market share and profitabil-ity growth within these markets.

In the late 1960s, Canon initially adopted a business-level strategic vision of focusing on the small photocopier niche that was underserved by its major competitors using a technology that was totally different than the existing tech-nologies used by the competition. The strategic vision provided direction for Canon's strategic planning process. At the same time, the corporate planning process was flexible enough to allow Canon to recognize and exploit opportuni-ties in related markets over the long run and to adopt the corporate strategy by diversification based on the evolution of its core competencies. Over the long run, the development and application of Canon's strategy was successful and has made the company a leader in the imaging industry group.

The assignment provides current data about Canon's business units with re-spect to sales revenue and market shares for the core products. Further, a SWOT analysis is done for the company and together with a industry attractiveness and competitive strengths rating of each business unit a nine-cell matrix developed. The work concludes with some general recommendations for the future strategy of Canon Inc. and some particular ones for each business unit. Finally, some general management aspects are provided by the ITM checklist.