Part of a apple case study

4. The kind of corporate level strategy that the company is pursuing

Mission:

Apple's mission is to "bring the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals, and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and internet offerings."

Goal:

Apple's goal is to be an innovator in personal computing and digital media through revolutionary design, development and distribution of it its line of products. As a firm believer in R&D, it aims to release and update products every year by offering best software and devices. Apple design Macs, that comes with OS X, Final Cut Pro, iLife and other professional software. It leads the digital music market with its iPods and iTunes online store, and has reinvented the mobile phone market with its iPhone and App store.

Corporate Strategy

Apple has been one of the pioneers of personal computing products which focus on quality, functionality, and sleek design. During its early years, its strategy was to focus on a single industry- the PC, where it has dominated aesthetics and visual appeal, as well as the desktop publishing and educational market. Its PC gets continuous product updates under the OS X operating system. Apple has also undergone horizontal integration where it reacquired assets of various clone makers to help protect and control the quality of its products.

Through vertical integration, the firm started to purse distribution to stay competitive with fellow PC maker- Dell, who was dominant at the time. To further gain competitive advantage in the computing industry, Apple has started opening retails stores which garnered a lot of attention due to its friendly staff and elegant design. By expanding operations to the marketing and retail segment, its sales had a major boost.

By this time, their PC market has somewhat slowed down due to intense competition from rivals such as HP and Dell, who at that time, were involved in price wars leaving Apple's high costs troublesome. In order to alleviate some of this burden, Apple has started to shift its corporate level strategy and started to diversify. The introduction of iPod gained a lot of attention as consumers were willing to pay premium price for visual design, increased music storage space, and top notch quality. Backed by top artists and big music labels, the iPod and iTunes music became a hit. The success of iPod brought about competition from other companies such as SanDisk and Microsoft, but it did not matter much as iPod dominated the market nonetheless.

As the market for digital music players plateau, Apple had something new up its sleeve- the iPhone. By incorporating a digital music player, a web browser, a camera, a cellphone, plus a whole lot more, Apple's smartphone came to be. Like with all its products, Apple stayed true to its core- the design. The unit comes with a touch screen design which differentiated it once again from the industry. Over time, new models of iPhone was released which supposedly fixes what the previous model lacks. And by teaming up with AT&T, Apple was able to even lower the cost of its iPhone making it one of the top choices for smartphones for everyday consumers. iPod had iTunes music digital files, and iPhone had Apple Store. The Apple Store allowed third-party programmers to write applications for the phone, which in then even further increased sales.

As seen through its history, Apple is seen as an innovator with its new product offerings over the years. Its revenue and profits stayed strong during the PC to iPod then to the iPhone timeline. As the market starts to mature with what's currently available, it's only a matter of time before Apple releases something revolutionary again, and whatever that maybe, we can be rest assured that it will look good.