Iceland Supermarkets and its Stakeholders

Business Environment

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .....................................................................................................................................3
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................3
1.1 Identifying purposes of the following organizations.............................................................3
1.2 Extent to which Iceland Supermarkets meeting the objectives of its stakeholders...............4
1.3 Responsibilities of Iceland Supermarkets and its strategies to meet them............................5
Task 2 ..............................................................................................................................................6
2.1 How different economic systems attempt to allocate resources effectively?........................6
2.2 Impact of fiscal and monetary policy and other regulatory mechanism ...............................7
2.3 Impact of competition policy and other regulatory mechanism on Iceland Supermarkets....8
Task 3...............................................................................................................................................8
3.1 How market structures determine the pricing and output decisions of businesses?..............8
3.2 Ways in which market forces shape Iceland Supermarket responses....................................9
3.3 How business and cultural environments shape the behavior of Iceland Supermarket?.....10
Task 4.............................................................................................................................................10
4.1 Significance of International trade on Iceland Supermarket................................................10
4.2 Analyzing the impact of global factors on Iceland Supermarket.........................................11
4.3 Impact of policies of European Union on Iceland Supermarket..........................................13
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................13
REFERENCE.................................................................................................................................15
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INTRODUCTION
Business Environment refers to combination of internal and external determinants which
impact organization’s business operations (Babin, Boles and Griffin 2015). The internal factors
are those factors that are present within business and are usually controllable such as objectives,
policies, production capacity, organizational structure and culture, manufacturing techniques and
employees of the firm. On the contrary, external factors are those determinants that exist outside
the organizations such as customers, suppliers, competitors and marketing intermediaries. The
present report features business environment of Iceland Supermarkets which is a supermarket
chain in UK (Bah and Fang, 2015). The report covers various aspects that impact the operations
of the chosen retail company in national and international markets.
TASK 1
1.1 Identifying purposes of the following organizations
Every organization runs business to achieve their organizational purposes. The main
purpose of businesses is to earn profits by increasing their sales. The purpose of the following
organizations is as follows:
A) Iceland Supermarkets (Private organization): Iceland Supermarkets is a British supermarket
chain that offers great deals on frozen food items to its customers. The purpose of the
organization is to maximize its profits by increasing sales of its frozen food products through
attractive deals. The British retailer lately introduced a free national home delivery service of its
products to its valued consumers. For this, Iceland Supermarkets developed online shopping
service and had made it available to 84 percent of its UK customers. In addition to this, the
company has developed new products to capture larger market share. Besides this, the retailer
also came up with innovative idea called The Food Warehouse that sells wide range of luxury
and specialty frozen food including vegetables and meat items (The Iceland Story, 2015).
B) KFC (Fast food chain): Kentucky Fried Chicken is very well known fast food restaurant
chain in the world. The company specializes in fried chicken and its aim is to popularize the
concept of franchise business all around the globe. The purpose of fast food giant is to expand its
market share and profits across the globe (Gaskill, Van Auken and Kim, 2015).
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C) Transport for London (TFL) (Public sector) - TFL is a government organization which is
responsible for providing transport services to the population of Greater London in UK. The
main purpose of TFL is to implement transport strategy across London to provide transportation
services to people through rails, roads, cross rails and underground commutation facilities.
D) Cancer Research (charity firm): Cancer Research is a registered charity organization in UK
that aims to pioneer research to cure cancer without government funding (Cancer Research UK,
2015). The main purpose of the organization is to raise funds for the research for all types of
cancer in order to cure it. The firm collects money from public for a social cause and does not
aim to make profits.
1.2 Extent to which Iceland Supermarkets meeting the objectives of its stakeholders
Stakeholders are those individuals or groups who can significantly affect the actions and
objectives as well as policies of an organization. The key stakeholders of Iceland Supermarkets
are government, customers, employees, investors, suppliers and community. The company’s aim
is to become a responsible retailer to meet objectives of its key stakeholders. Iceland
Supermarkets is committed to provide healthy, safe and ethically sourced food products to
consumers. In order to achieve this objective, it became the first retailer of UK to eliminate
artificial colors, flavors and unimportant preservatives from its own brand. In addition to this, it
also banned genetically modified components from its brand products. Besides this, it also
banned mechanically recovered meat and hydrogenated fats which is a form of man-made trans
fats from its products (Lee, Kim, Seo and Hight, 2015). Iceland Supermarkets source its products
from approved suppliers in order to meet global food safety standards set by British Retail
Consortium (BRC). It encourages healthy eating among consumers by providing them with full
information about nutrition value and ingredients of its products through well defined labeled
products. In addition to this, it also provides information related to allergies on the product labels
to make those customers aware of the food allergens that are allergic to certain food items.
Apart from this, it also meets objectives of UK community by taking certain remarkable
initiatives. This involves working as an official partner with UK government to promote public
health by providing healthy and artificial trans fats free food items to its consumers. Further it
adheres strictly to follow animal welfare policy regulated by Farm Welfare Council. In addition
to this, the retail company ensures that Iceland brand suppliers must follow Fish Welfare Policy
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