Please reffer the following:
Book: Strategic Management Concepts and Cases: Competitiveness and Globalization, 11th Edition.
Chapter: The internal organization:resources, capablities, core competencies, and competitive advantages.
Chapter: The external envirnment: opportunities, threats, industry comptition, and compitition envirnment.
Assignment 1:
Please write 1-2 page answer to Exercise, Chapter. You don't have to include the table in your answer. Just give an evaluation (on the scale of 1 to 10) for each of the five forces, based on your analysis of relevant factors for each force. One short paragraph of analysis is sufficient for each force.
Please note that the exercise asks you to rate how favorable each of the five forces are to the auto industry. So if a force is favorable to the auto industry then you rate it high toward 10, and if a force is unfavorable you rate it low toward 1. For example, if consumers have high bargaining power against auto makers, then it's unfavorable to auto industry, so the rating is toward 1, not toward 10.
Assignment 2:
Please write 1-2 page answer to the following questions about Zara's core competency.
Please read the opening case of Zara in Chapter, and use value chain analysis to identify Zara's core competency. Please answer the following questions in your analysis:
Which value chain activities (marketing, logistics, design, human resource management, etc.) make Zara competitive compared with major rivals in the industry segment? What resources (tangible and intangible) and capabilities does Zara have that are valuable, rare, non-imitable, and non-substitutable? How sustainable is Zara's core competency? Or, how long/how easy does it take for Zara's competitors to duplicate or substitute Zara's resources and capabilities? (Hint: intangible resources are harder to duplicate than tangible resources such as factories.)
Also, pay attention that strength and weakness are defined as "relative to competitors". So try to compare Zara with its major competitors for each value chain activity.