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Assessment Of Strategy And Performance

Our core strategy is to be the leading provider of high-quality, differentiated
tablets. The successful implementation of this plan allowed us to generate
substantial shareholder value giving us the financial capacity to benefit our
shareholders as well as people and the planet. Overall, we surpassed our strategic,
operational and financial goals, but would have liked to have done more for the
people and planet.
The implementation of our strategic plan involved three stages: invest, grow and
harvest.:
Invest (Year 1 and 2). Early on we invested heavily to differentiate our product.
This strategy was highly successful with the early achievement of ISO 9004 and a
high quality index.
Grow (Year 3 and 4). In this stage, we focused upon increasing the top line,
rather than profits. To do so, we pivoted to the U.S. and European Consumer
market segments, used joint ventures (JVs XX) and licencing agreements to
inexpensively round out our product line and rolled out additional services to
further differentiate our offering. We also successfully fought off the onslaught of
competition into our core European market and pivoted into the U.S. and European
Consumer markets.
In the third year, Europe became by far the most competitive geographic segment
with two new entrants. This led to a hiccup in our results, but we bounced back
strongly in the ensuing years via a three-pronged tactical strategy. First, we further
differentiated our core Enterprise product with additional services. Second, we
used JVs and licencing agreements to inexpensively round out our European
Consumer product line and take advantage of the financial and operational
weakness in our largest European competitor (Team A). Third, we pivoted into the
U.S. by taking advantage of the price umbrella provided by our U.S. competitor
with 67% share of the U.S. Consumer segment.
That said, the onslaught of competition in year 3 combined with the recession
forecasted for year 4 (we have since fired our forecasting firm and replaced them
with a cheaper, yet more accurate, algorithm), resulted in less investment in
people and the planet then we would have liked.
Harvest (Year 5 and 6).
In this stage, we limited investment and kept expenses low. In order to maximize
profit we raised prices and culled our offering in an attempt to reduce sales
volumes to optimize capacity utilization. This resulted in an ROS, ROA, ROE,
profit margin and EPS that exceeded both our objectives and all of our
competitors.
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Overall achieved financial goals with best ROCE, best profits etc. However, if
there was a shortfall we were too short-term focused by viewing the product in
Trade-off

Shock year 3 recovered well. Perhaps too conservative in Year 4 when recession
was forecasted, which limited people and planet, but no req2uire restructuring or
increased fin, unlike our core domestic
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We chose this strategy because it would allow us to differentiate our product and
thereby delay the impact of inevitable commoditization in the tablet market.