Vicinity Centres Trust SWOT Analysis / Matrix

Business Essays, Term Papers & Research Papers

SWOT analysis is a vital strategic planning tool that can be used by Vicinity Centres Trust managers to do a situational analysis of the organization . It is an important technique to map out the present Strengths (S), Weakness (W), Opportunities (O) & Threats (T) Vicinity Centres Trust is facing in its current business environment.

The Vicinity Centres Trust is one of the leading firms in its industry. Vicinity Centres Trust maintains its prominent position in market by carefully analyzing and reviewing the SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis an immensenly interactive process and requires effective coordination among various departments within the firm such as – marketing, finance, operations, management information systems and strategic planning.

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The SWOT Analysis framework facilitates an organization to identify the internal strategic factors such as -strengths and weaknesses, & external strategic factors such as - opportunities and threats. It leads to a 2X2 matrix – also known as SWOT Matrix.

The Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) Analysis / Matrix helps the managers of the Vicinity Centres Trust to develop four types of strategies:

SO (strengths-opportunities) Strategies
WO (weaknesses-opportunities) Strategies
ST (strengths-threats) Strategies
WT (weaknesses-threats) Strategies

Vicinity Centres Trust swot analysis / matrix

SWOT Matrix Strategies Objective

The central purpose of SWOT matrix is to identify the strategies that a firm can use to exploit external opportunities, counter threats, and build on & protect Vicinity Centres Trust strengths, and eradicate its weaknesses.

Step by Step Guide to Vicinity Centres Trust SWOT Analysis

Strengths of Vicinity Centres Trust – Internal Strategic Factors

As one of the leading companies in its industry, Vicinity Centres Trust has numerous strengths that help it to thrive in the market place. These strengths not only help it to protect the market share in existing markets but also help in penetrating new markets. Based on Fern Fort University extensive research – some of the strengths of Vicinity Centres Trust are –

Read - Vicinity Centres Trust Porter 5 Forces Analysis & Industry Analysis
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Highly skilled workforce through successful training and learning programs. Vicinity Centres Trust is investing huge resources in training and development of its employees resulting in a workforce that is not only highly skilled but also motivated to achieve more.
Strong Free Cash Flow – Vicinity Centres Trust has strong free cash flows that provide resources in the hand of the company to expand into new projects.
Strong Brand Portfolio – Over the years Vicinity Centres Trust has invested in building a strong brand portfolio. The SWOT analysis of Vicinity Centres Trust just underlines this fact. This brand portfolio can be extremely useful if the organization wants to expand into new product categories.
Successful track record of integrating complimentary firms through mergers & acquisition. It has successfully integrated number of technology companies in the past few years to streamline its operations and to build a reliable supply chain.
Superb Performance in New Markets – Vicinity Centres Trust has built expertise at entering new markets and making success of them. The expansion has helped the organization to build new revenue stream and diversify the economic cycle risk in the markets it operates in.
Automation of activities brought consistency of quality to Vicinity Centres Trust products and has enabled the company to scale up and scale down based on the demand conditions in the market.
Successful track record of developing new products – product innovation.
Strong distribution network – Over the years Vicinity Centres Trust has built a reliable distribution network that can reach majority of its potential market.

Weakness of Vicinity Centres Trust – Internal Strategic Factors

Weakness are the areas where Vicinity Centres Trust can improve upon. Strategy is about making choices and weakness are the areas where an organization can improve using SWOT analysis and build on its competitive advantage and strategic positioning.

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Investment in Research and Development is below the fastest growing players in the industry. Even though Vicinity Centres Trust is spending above the industry average on Research and Development, it has not been able to compete with the leading players in the industry in terms of innovation. It has come across as a mature firm looking forward to bring out products based on tested features in the market.
Organization structure is only compatible with present business model thus limiting expansion in adjacent product segments.
Financial planning is not done properly and efficiently. The current asset ratio and liquid asset ratios suggest that the company can use the cash more efficiently than what it is doing at present.
Days inventory is high compare to the competitors – making the company raise more capital to invest in the channel. This can impact the long term growth of Vicinity Centres Trust
Not highly successful at integrating firms with different work culture. As mentioned earlier even though Vicinity Centres Trust is successful at integrating small companies it has its share of failure to merge firms that have different work culture.
Limited success outside core business – Even though Vicinity Centres Trust is one of the leading organizations in its industry it has faced challenges in moving to other product segments with its present culture.
The company has not being able to tackle the challenges present by the new entrants in the segment and has lost small market share in the niche categories. Vicinity Centres Trust has to build internal feedback mechanism directly from sales team on ground to counter these challenges.

Opportunities for Vicinity Centres Trust – External Strategic Factors

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New environmental policies – The new opportunities will create a level playing field for all the players in the industry. It represent a great opportunity for Vicinity Centres Trust to drive home its advantage in new technology and gain market share in the new product category.
Lower inflation rate – The low inflation rate bring more stability in the market, enable credit at lower interest rate to the customers of Vicinity Centres Trust.
The market development will lead to dilution of competitor’s advantage and enable Vicinity Centres Trust to increase its competitiveness compare to the other competitors.
New customers from online channel – Over the past few years the company has invested vast sum of money into the online platform. This investment has opened new sales channel for Vicinity Centres Trust. In the next few years the company can leverage this opportunity by knowing its customer better and serving their needs using big data analytics.
Government green drive also opens an opportunity for procurement of Vicinity Centres Trust products by the state as well as federal government contractors.
Decreasing cost of transportation because of lower shipping prices can also bring down the cost of Vicinity Centres Trust’s products thus providing an opportunity to the company - either to boost its profitability or pass on the benefits to the customers to gain market share.
Opening up of new markets because of government agreement – the adoption of new technology standard and government free trade agreement has provided Vicinity Centres Trust an opportunity to enter a new emerging market.
Organization’s core competencies can be a success in similar other products field. A comparative example could be - GE healthcare research helped it in developing better Oil drilling machines.

Threats Vicinity Centres Trust Facing - External Strategic Factors

New technologies developed by the competitor or market disruptor could be a serious threat to the industry in medium to long term future.
As the company is operating in numerous countries it is exposed to currency fluctuations especially given the volatile political climate in number of markets across the world.
Rising pay level especially movements such as $15 an hour and increasing prices in the China can lead to serious pressure on profitability of Vicinity Centres Trust
Changing consumer buying behavior from online channel could be a threat to the existing physical infrastructure driven supply chain model.
Growing strengths of local distributors also presents a threat in some markets as the competition is paying higher margins to the local distributors.
No regular supply of innovative products – Over the years the company has developed numerous products but those are often response to the development by other players. Secondly the supply of new products is not regular thus leading to high and low swings in the sales number over period of time.
Shortage of skilled workforce in certain global market represents a threat to steady growth of profits for Vicinity Centres Trust in those markets.
The demand of the highly profitable products is seasonal in nature and any unlikely event during the peak season may impact the profitability of the company in short to medium term.

Limitations of SWOT Analysis for Vicinity Centres Trust

Although the SWOT analysis is widely used as a strategic planning tool, the analysis does have its share of limitations.

Certain capabilities or factors of an organization can be both a strength and weakness at the same time. This is one of the major limitations of SWOT analysis . For example changing environmental regulations can be both a threat to company it can also be an opportunity in a sense that it will enable the company to be on a level playing field or at advantage to competitors if it able to develop the products faster than the competitors.
SWOT does not show how to achieve a competitive advantage, so it must not be an end in itself.
The matrix is only a starting point for a discussion on how proposed strategies could be implemented. It provided an evaluation window but not an implementation plan based on strategic competitiveness of Vicinity Centres Trust
SWOT is a static assessment - analysis of status quo with few prospective changes. As circumstances, capabilities, threats, and strategies change, the dynamics of a competitive environment may not be revealed in a single matrix.
SWOT analysis may lead the firm to overemphasize a single internal or external factor in formulating strategies. There are interrelationships among the key internal and external factors that SWOT does not reveal that may be important in devising strategies.

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Weighted SWOT Analysis of Vicinity Centres Trust

In light of the above mentioned limitations of the SWOT analysis / matrix, corporate managers decided to provide weightage to each internal strength and weakness of the firm. Organizations also assess the likelihood of events taking place in the coming future and how strong their impact could be on company's performance.

This method is called Weighted SWOT analysis. It is better than doing simplistic SWOT analysis because with Weighted SWOT Analysis Vicinity Centres Trust managers can focus on the most critical factors and discount the non-important one. It also solves the long list problem where organizations ends up making a long list but none of the factors deemed too critical.

Limitation of Weighted SWOT analysis of Vicinity Centres Trust

This approach also suffers from one major drawback - it focus on individual importance of factor rather than how they are collectively important and impact the business holistically.

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Example of Weighted SWOT Analysis

You can email us to get an example document of Weighted SWOT analysis.

SWOT Worksheet & Template

If you like to do your own SWOT analysis or want to make your own Weighted SWOT SWOT matrix then feel free to download Fern Fort University SWOT Analysis Template.

References / Citations & Bibliography

M. E. Porter, Competitive Strategy(New York: Free Press, 1980)
A. D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962)
O. E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies(New York: Free Press, 1975);
L. Wrigley, Divisional Autonomy and Diversification (PhD, Harvard Business School, 1970)
R. E. White, Generic Business Strategies, Organizational Context and Performance: An Empirical Investigation, Strategic Management Journal7 (1986)