Environmental Scanning of Stella Artois

ENVIRONMENT SCANNING

The internal and external environment of a company is done by the tool SWOT analysis. Swot stands for strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. SWOT analysis framework has gained widespread acceptance because it is both simple and powerful for strategy development. Strengths and the weakness are the factors of internal environment of the organization and the opportunities and threats are the factors of external environment of the organization. The strengths and the weaknesses can be related in internal environment of the company as the in-house talent or vacancies, up to date skills or need for training, good computer networks or out of date software. Opportunities and threats of external environment of the organization relates to the changing day to day fashion and trends in the world, changing technology, what the competitors intend to do.

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT SCANNING

In 1990, the company expanded rapidly after having heaps of acquisitions, the company's total volume of production increased to 57.5 million in 1998 from 14.7 million in 1992. The company started focusing on developing key markets such as Belgium, the Netherlands, France and North America and in central Europe through acquisitions. The company reduced its dependence on the Belgian market from 44 percent in 1992 to 10 percent in 1998. As a result, the company's goals were achieved when more than 50 percent of its total volume was produced in growth markets including Mexico. The top 10 markets of the beer accounted for 86 percent of the company total volume in 1998. The Mexican beer market alone had 37 percent of the total volume in 1998 whereas the united states, Belgium, Canada and the united kingdom were the next important markets for the company, moreover company started giving more increased importance to the smaller growing markets such as Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania. The company acquisitions strategy in 1990 resulted in acquisitions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Korea, Montenegro, Canada, china, Russia, the Ukraine, the united states, in a joint ventures in south Korea and Mexico and Luxembourg as minority equity positions. The company had some licensing agreements in Australia, Italy, Sweden and United Kingdom. The company with all these breweries sold its beers to 80 countries worldwide. The company opened new markets in Asia, central, Eastern Europe, and America. In late 90 the company had rapid growth through its internalization, Growing sales in key markets and successful and careful introductions to newly developed global markets show good regional brand management capabilities and potential appeal for Stella Artois as an international brand.

The company faced some threats from the external environment, the company had to face challenges with its competitors, and as the beer markets were growing rapidly which entered several companies to enter into the competition, the company had many competitors such as Carlsberg, Corona, and Heineken etc.

There was a further decrease in consumption in the key markets of the company, a factor that might had a dampening effect on the trends towards industry consolidation was that the local tastes were different. It doesn't matter that the beer brands had hundreds of years of heritage behind them but still consumers were