Tropical Cyclone Steve has dumped so much rain in the northwest, which makes the Gascoyne River has broken its banks and tens of thousands of tons of rich red topsoil has been washed out to the sea. This has made their soil and their crops as well as irrigation lines and the year’s profits have washed away from the growers, which causing them to have huge losses that cost millions of dollars. After that, the growers are back in their business again and then they formed a group named as Gascoyne Gold.
Gascoyne Gold has been formed with 7 shareholders, which they have invested more than $1 million, setting up a state of the art processing and packaging facility. Before they have formed, each of the growers would pick the crops in the day and grade and pack it during the night. But now they have upgraded their equipment by using the latest technology for spraying crops and crawlers creep along the rows which make it easier and more efficient to pick. The crops that they are mainly processed are tomatoes, but there are also processing some other crops such as capsicum and cucumber. Now, the Gascoyne Gold growers have only one middleman and the person is responsible to get the best price anywhere in the Australia.
Besides that, efficiency is the key to make the business become survival and the aim of the business is to grow the best quality and at the same time they can get the maximum number of kilos per bush. The best that the individual can produce are up to 7 kilos of tomatoes. The key to the success of Gascoyne Gold is the latest technology, which is used to handle the process of quality control, perfect grading, marketing and distribution strategies. The process of quality control would require the tomatoes to be photographed four times and computer graded for size and ripeness as well as the grading is important in order to prevent arriving the overripe tomatoes from spoiling the whole shipment.The Gascoyne Gold also would make sure that the opportunities that is available is taken by them and they are also aware that they are planning for their future which is based on the hard work made by the generations before them. Thus, they have improved it by making more money for themselves and also for everyone involved in the operations that is from sharefarmers to the process of workers.
They have proved it by doubling their output in two years and plan to expand a wider range of fruits and vegetables. The Gascoyne Gold group teaches an important lesson about how doing business.First and foremost, most of the business owners and the managers would consider the most important logical strategic direction in order to run their business which are growing. They believe that if the business does not grow over the time pass, it is more likely to fail especially for the strategic business units. The growth of the business can be the best direction for the business success but it is not necessarily important for all of the business in the world.
Thus, the portfolio model that is useful in examining the growth of the business success is the BCG matrix which shows that it is one of the tools that is used by the company in order to compare all the strategic business units (SBUs). It can be evaluated based on the some specific criteria when it can give some indication of the most logical strategic direction to take each of the SBUs and the level of resources that they have to commit. This model has certain uses and advantages in helping the company to run their business and deciding on the marketing decisions and it also even has some of the limitations as well as the method of calculating and analyzing the results for the company.In addition, BCG Growth-Share Matrix comes from the combination of words of Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the early 1970’s Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group has developed this type of portfolio planning model.
The BCG matrix usually used to represent graphically among divisions in terms of relative market share position and industry growth rate. The BCG also allows a multidivisional organization to manage its portfolio of businesses by examining the relative market share position and the industry growth rate of each division which related to the other divisions in the organization.The BCG model is based on the product life cycle theory which can be used to determine which one of the product should be given the priority in the product portfolio of a business unit. It is usually based on the observations towards the company’s business units that it can be classified into four categories based on combinations of market growth and market share relative to the largest competitors that brings the name of “growth-share”.
As to make sure that the long-term value creation is made, the company should have a specification of the products which contains both high-growth products in need of cash inputs and low-growth products that generate a lot of cash.The BCG matrix portrays the perspective of the product portfolio, which is the growth-share matrix. This framework of tool categorizes products within a company's portfolio or within the business units as stars, cash cows, dogs, or question marks according to growth rate, market share, and positively or negative cash flow. By using positive cash flows a company can capitalize on growth opportunities. From this analysis, it can be seen that the products that is growing successfully and have high market share as well as the product that is slowly growing and have a low rate market share.Bruce Henderson usually would tell the clients that the payoff for leadership in market share is definitely very high if it is achieved early and maintained until growth starts to slow down.
In addition, if the cash is available in the company, the investment in market share during the growth phase can be very attractive in their business. Growth in the market is compounded and is portrayed by growth in share while increases in share would help to increase the profit margin and thus the return on investment is enormous.The BCG matrix also can serve as a simple tool for viewing a corporation’s business portfolio at a glance and may serve as a starting point for discussing resource allocation among strategic business units (SBUs). It also is used in order to help the companies to assess the profiles of the products or the businesses, to determine the cash demands of the products, to identify the development cycles of products and the resource allocation and divestment decisions.Thus, the purpose of using the BCG matrix can turn into some steps which are the company need to identify and divide a company into SBU. Then, they need to access and compare the prospects of each SBU according to two criteria which is SBU’s relative market share and growth rate of the SBU’s industry.
The company also needs to make some classifying for the SBU’s on the basis of the BCG matrix. The last steps that they can do after identifying all of the results is to develop the strategic objectives for each SBU.The BCG matrix also can have some benefits which it is simple and easy to understand by everyone especially the business person. It also can help the company to quickly and simply screen the opportunities that are open to them in the business areas and it can even help them to think about how they can make the most of them. Therefore, the BCG matrix can bring the benefit to them by helping to identify them on how the corporate cash resources can be the best to be used in order to maximize a company’s future growth and profitability.In order to analyze the case study of Gascoyne Gold, the objective is measured as to identify sales strategic position by using the BCG Matrix.
The sales strategic positions means that the company need to categorize and classifies the sales of the product that they offer and they need to determine which products have the good sales and which product is not. Thus, based on the that classification, it can help the company determine the products in each of the quadrant that is possible according to the sales of the products.There are four quadrants that can be used in order to classify which products in the case study of Gascoyne Gold that falls in that quadrant. In the case study of Gascoyne Gold, there are four products that is available which are product A is cucumber, product B is cauliflower, product C is capsicum and product D is tomato. The quadrants for all of the products need to be identified in order to know in which quadrant they fall and this can help the company determine the products that shows the high sales and which products is not good in their selling.
From this the company can develop their sales strategic positions through these results.Another purpose of the study for Gascoyne Gold is to determine the investment priorities for a company with a portfolio of products or business units (BUs). This means that it can help the company to identify the products that shows and give high investment and high income towards them. When they have identified the products that is the best they can maintain on selling the products instead of selling the product that have low growth rates and market share. The company also can know which products have higher priority through the investment when they should believe that the products that have high sales need to be invested more in order to gain high revenue towards the profits of the company itself.
The last objective of analyzing the case study of Gascoyne Gold shows that the BCG matrix also is used to portray firm’s brand portfolio or SBUs on a quadrant along relative market share axis (horizontal axis) and speed of market growth (vertical axis) axis for the Gascoyne Gold. The most popular and stabilize brand of the product can be determined by using the BCG matrix when the company classified them into four quadrants based on the relative market share and the speed of the market growth for each of the products. Thus, the company of Gascoyne Gold can determine which of the products that brings the best brand portfolio or characteristics.BCG matrix is a structure created by Boston Consulting Group to assess the strategic position of the business brand portfolio and its potential.
According to Healy (1955), the BCG matrix makes people feels comfortable as it is easy to plot, uses catchy or interesting names for each of the quadrants that makes people easy to remember about it and allows the decision makers to compare all of the SBUs under the company’s umbrella on some criteria that are taken to represent the cash generation and the resources needs.It classifies business portfolio into four categories based on industry attractiveness (growth rate of that industry) and competitive position (relative market share). These two dimensions reveal the likely profitability of the business portfolio in terms of cash needed to support that unit and cash generated by it. The general purpose of the analysis is to help understand, which brands, the firm should invest in and which ones should be divested. Based on the figure below, there are question marks, stars, cash cow and dogs quadrants.Figure 1: The framework of BCG matrixQuestion markA question mark is a product growing rapidly in a growing industry.
Question marks quadrant indicates that the company do not generate profits unless they decides to invest resources to maintain and even increase the market share which can become potential stars which would later become cash cow. They have a high demand for liquidity. They hold low market share in fast growing markets consuming large amount of cash and incurring losses. Question marks do not always succeed and even after large amount of investments they struggle to gain market share. The strategy that can be used by question mark is either to invest more fund for future grow or do not invest or disinvest. Strategic options for question marks include market penetration, market development, product development and all intensive strategies or divestment.
