Zara and Burberry are both companies are in the clothing market however, exist in very different ends of the industry. Burberry is a high-end name brand retailer whereas Zara is a lower end fast fashion retailer. Zara has built its brand through the building blocks of Superior Efficiency and Price. The clothing store has stores in over 2200 stores in 93 countries and is one of the world's leading fast fashion retailers. Instead of focusing on pricey advertising campaigns, Zara has focused on efficiency. The company does not sell its clothes online and has created an efficient supply chain system. This system allows the company to adopt a design to shop floor turnaround time of three weeks. This allows the company to be almost …show more content…
Air Canada is placed in the global strategic group being a larger and more luxurious airline marketed towards business and wealthier travelers while WestJet is placed in the regional strategic group being a lower priced, "budget airline".
I think it is appropriate to compare the two airlines. Both airlines have a competitive advantage in their respective areas, however Air Canada has a slight hand over WestJet. Air Canada has a competitive advantage using superior quality, innovation and customer responsiveness. Air Canada is able to charge more as customers find these qualities to add value to the service. WestJet on the other hand, has a competitive advantage using pricing as well as …show more content…
Staples
This discussion post was interesting for me as I had the idea that the two companies were pretty much the same but after looking at their strategies and business structure it was obvious they are not.
After reviewing the accounting ratios, it is clear that Office Depot has a hand over Staples. The company has a much lower cost of goods sold, working capital, and invested capital, but still returns a higher return on sales, capital turnover, return on invested capital, and overall net profit. Office Depot can make higher profits than Staples by being more efficient - investing less but using their resource better.
Although Office Depot may have better numbers, I think it's still important to remember that they also focus on different areas of office supply. Staples focuses on innovation, stocking high priced electronic appliances such as printers and computers whereas Office Depot tends to stick to the traditional office supplies such as pens, paper, etc. This has a huge effect on the accounting ratios as Staples must invest a lot more to purchase equipment and will obviously have a higher cost of goods