SWOT Analysis of Alphabet Inc. (Google) for Business Strategy

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This report provides a comprehensive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of Alphabet Inc. (Google). The strengths highlighted include dominance in web search, online advertising, and a diversified product portfolio, along with a strong brand name and innovative culture. Weaknesses identified are gaps in the product range, inefficient financial planning, and challenges in integrating acquired firms, alongside issues related to data privacy and advertising boycotts. Opportunities encompass increasing technological changes, rising customer spending, and the potential for diversification into non-ad business models. Threats include competition from emerging technologies, a shortage of skilled workforce, and reliance on advertising revenue, as well as increasing competition from companies like Amazon. The analysis underscores Alphabet Inc.'s position in the market, its strategic challenges, and the dynamic forces shaping its future.
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Running Head: ALPHABET INC. 0
Management
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ALPHABET INC 1
SWOT analysis of the Alphabet Inc.
Strengths
Firstly, it has dominance in the web search, online advertising, video content sharing,
browser usage, mobile OS and many other areas. Online advertising has proved to be
the main source of revenue for the company. The main advantage of the company is
that it dominates the digital advertising market with the help of various channels such
as Adsense, Android OS, and YouTube. As compared to this, Yahoo is the major
competitor of it. It also has several users through the ads of Yahoo mail. It also proves
to be the most powerful source of marketing (Gurel and Tat, 2017).
It has a diversified portfolio related to the services and products such as Chrome,
YouTube, and Gmail. Due to this company has proved to be innovative. The company
also do continuous investment in research and development continuing to adopting
new customer trends and technologies. Moreover, most of its subsidiary brands gain
high market share due to first comer in the market owing innovative technologies and
ideas.
In the year 2017, it has earned the highest revenue of around 65 Billion dollars by
ensuring the partnership with various sites. As compared to this, Yahoo was not able
to earn this much revenue.
It also has the biggest smartphone market share. It has also maintained a strong
leadership position in the segment of online advertising. As per the eMarketer
forecasting, the revenue of Alphabet Inc. will get increase in the coming years due to
its unique contents (Ciriello, Richter and Schwabe, 2018).
Strong brand name is the biggest strength of the company. It also has the best record
of the development of new products. This help the company to increase customer
recognition in the segmented markets, gaining of customer loyalty and shared value,
easy introduction of new products, enhanced credibility and ease of products.
In the past few years, it has built strong and effective culture that encourages the
members to work with higher productivity. The presence of ecosystem of its services
and product is also considered to be the strength of the company. Most of the product
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ALPHABET INC 2
and services of Google is also integrated properly with each other that encourage the
customer make use its services and products.
Alphabet Inc. is also known for its unique organisational culture that has effective
integration and informality with the work. It has also developed such culture that
tends to motivate, attract as well as retain the most talent persons at the workplace. In
addition, it also gives right direction to the employees and they can also coordinate
their individual goal with the corporate goals.
It is also founded that the search engine of Alphabet Inc. process around 70 per cent
of the queries across the World. In recent time too, it is the biggest Internet
advertising company by earning the huge revenue. Google is the most used search
engine where companies also advertise them for getting customer attention.
Google has also taken great pride in the culture. Using this, it tends sot embrace
creativity, collaboration. Besides this, it also tends to encourage innovative ideas in
order to address the complex and technical problems. Collaborating innovation ideas
with corporate culture helps the brand to establish a distinct value in the market and
within the enterprise.
It believes that employees are an essential asset. Due to its, employees also believe
that it tends to provide a great culture in order to work. It also works with a great
culture by providing great compensation program to every employee. This helps in
motivating employees and influence them to work towards attaining corporate goals
in most effective way.
Weaknesses
It is found that there is a gap in the range of products that are sold by the company.
The lack of choices further provides the new competitor strength in the market.
Hence, it will help the company to cover the untapped market in the most efficient
and effective way.
Financial planning is also not done effectively and properly. It is because the current
ratio of the company also suggests that company can still use the cash more
effectively. These difference may not create big issues for today, but for future, it can
cause huge financial loss to the company.
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ALPHABET INC 3
The brand portfolio of Alphabet Inc. is vast. It also includes the Calico, Access, GV,
Nest, Verily, CapitalG and X. it is true that all the products and services of Alphabet
Inc. are generating profit. Most of the new projects and initiative requires huge capital
investment for development. Due to this, there is no sign of the profit in the coming
future.
Google has strong financial health. As compared to this, Yahoo does not have that
much financial healthy. Due to this, it is not promising for investors. In addition, the
company can diversify and capitalize into new areas to ensure is sustainability for a
longer period of time.
It is also true that the sustainability of revenue is not ensured. It is because there is
possibility that advertiser can break the contract any time due to presence of several
reasons. This impacts company long term growth and development and thus also
impacts company success in the dynamic and competitive market.
The net contribution and profitability ratio is still below the industry average. It means
that in spite of its growth and revenue in the industry, it is required to bring some
changes to make stabilize the process and operations. This strategy will help the
company to strengthen its financial position over a long period of time.
It is also found that Alphabet is only successful in integrating the small firms who are
from the varied work culture. The biggest weakness attached to this is that it is failed
in merging the firms having different work culture. It put question to company
strategy relating to market development and diversification.
The boycott of Google, as well as YouTube by some of the major advertiser, proves
to be the weakness for it. It has negatively affected the image of Google. Some of the
companies that Boycott against it are HSBC, BBC, RBS, L’oreal, Johnson & Johnson,
The Guardian Newspaper, Havas, Audi, Volkswagen, Tesco and Sainsbury. It is also
founded that even British government has boycotted it. This mismanagement of
Google impact Alphabet Incorporation sustainability and long term growth.
In addition to this, Google has also slammed by several experts for its huge reliance
on privacy. However, it has taken several measures for addressing these obligations.
Due to this, potential changes in the revenue can be brought which could also damage
the reputation of Google. In relation with data privacy, the user's data was leaked at
various places including their personal information. Hence, this may reduce trust of
the users and may also impact on company branding.
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ALPHABET INC 4
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Opportunities
The increasing technological changes are helping the company to keep its money in
the bank with safety. Due to this, the more will be the cash in bank; more will the
opportunity for the company to invest in new technologies and several other product
segments. As compared to this, Yahoo mobile users are also increasing in developing
countries. Due to this, by bringing improvement and innovation in its services, it can
improve its market share. Besides this, it also has the potential to combine its services
with some of the social media platforms such as Flickr.
Several economic changes are also coming. Due to this, customer spending has also
increased. Hence, there is an opportunity for the company to increase its market share
as well as gain new customers (Shchurina & Mustafina, 2018).
The new environmental policy will help it in creating the level for it. It is true that the
government in every country has some environmental law for the company. Due to
this, Alphabet Inc. has great opportunity to bring several advantages through the
adoption of new technologies. It will help it in gaining a huge market share and
revenue. In recent time, customers are also becoming aware of their right due to
which companies are also required to work accordingly (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart
and Wright, 2017).
In every country, there is different taxation policy. Alphabet Inc. As the market leader
in the industry, it can make a significant impact on the business. It can also open up
the new opportunity for the established players such as Alphabet Inc. in order to
increase profitability. However, the company needs to comply with various significant
laws and rules in order stand in the market with competitive stand.
Development in the market will also lead to the dilution of the competitor's benefit. It
also enables the Alphabet Inc. in increasing the competitiveness as compared to the
other competitors. It is true that market development leads to several benefits such as
increase in the market share, gaining new range of customers, rise in sales and other
several leads.
Innovative and new trends in the consumer behaviour will open up several new
markets for the Alphabet Inc. further, it will provide the new opportunities for every
organisation unbuilding the new revenue. It will also enable it to diversify the new
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ALPHABET INC 6
categories of product (Phadermrod, Crowder and 2019). In addition, it will help the
company to be more competitive in the targeted market segments.
It can also diversify into the non-ad models of business. In order to maintain the
remaining profit as well as the current indication, it can push itself towards the
commercial transaction by using several sites like Google maps, and Google books. It
will also help it in getting the new customer base in varied business.
It is true that it introduced Google Play and Google Glasses. Therefore, it can boost
the Google development and progress. Inline to this, the company collaborated with
MobileIron, Inc., to integrate its cloud Orbitera commerce platform with MobileIron’s
app distribution, security and analytics capabilities. Cloud computing is a major
source for earning a great revenue share as it can be seen with Amazon AWS,
Microsoft Azure and so forth. In addition, this platform can also attract other big
organisations such as Netflix who is currently using Amazon AWS cloud platforms.
Threats
Several competitors in the market are coming up with the new technology. It will also
put the serious threat to the Alphabet Inc. it can affect the growth of it in the near
future. In the annual report of the company also, it is stated that several search engines
such as e bay, Amazon. WebMD and Linkedln are navigating the direct content, apps
and websites rather than going through Google. In recent time, some of the users
started relying on social networks such as Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook are
seeking the information (Lee, 2019).
In a certain global market, it has shortage of competent and skilled workforce. It
presents the threat to steady growth of the Alphabet Inc. as compare to this, Yahoo
major threat is the cultural issue that is going in the foreign market. Due to this, it
started facing several problems in terms of its customers as well as revenue.
Intense competition has affected the stable profit in the last two years. It is because it
tends to put the downward pressure on not only profit. As a result, it also affects the
overall sales of the company. As compared to this, the major threat for Yahoo is the
competition especially in China (Davenport and Harris, 2017).
In the year 2019, Amazon could also become a threat to it. It is true that the Alphabet
Inc. put a high reliance on advertising. Due to this, in the end, its business will only be
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ALPHABET INC 7
based on advertising. It can also prove to be a significant risk for alphabet Inc. at one
time. The fast move toward the app can affect the usage of search. In recent time, rate
of competitor is also increasing. In the last few years also, Alphabet Inc. has major
competitor that is Facebook. Amazon is also coming up with advertising in order to
turn revenue. Due to this, company can also lose the full market share in the current
year (Tidd and Bessant, 2018).
It believes our investor relations website also provides notifications of news or
announcements regarding our financial performance and other items of interest to our
investors, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and
blogs. The changes in climate are the biggest challenge that it is facing today. In the
greater extent, it is facing this issue. Due to this, it has also adopted a climate change
strategy. To some extent only, this strategy helps it in creating more resource-efficient
and sustainable world.
It has also revealed that financial and operational results are subject to some of the
uncertainties and risks. The major risk is the changing technology that tends to shift
the needs of the user. In recent time, youth demands are increasing, they require the
most advanced technology (Bull et al, 2016).
The competitive pressure for creativity and innovating will encompass a wider range
of products and services. As a result, they must continue to invest significant
resources in research and development, including through acquisitions. In addition,
they also need to adopt competitive and dynamic strategies with exploring existing
and anticipating future business environment to gain new and innovative ideas.
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References
Bull, J.W., Jobstvogt, N., Bohnke-Henrichs, A., Mascarenhas, A., Sitas, N., Baulcomb, C.,
Lambini, C.K., Rawlins, M., Baral, H., Zähringer, J. and Carter-Silk, E., 2016. Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats: A SWOT analysis of the ecosystem services
framework. Ecosystem services, 17, pp.99-111.
Butler, F.C. and Martin, J.A., 2016. The auto industry: adapt to disruptive innovations or risk
extinction. Strategic Direction, 32(11), pp.31-34.
Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A. and Schwabe, G., 2018. Digital innovation. Business &
Information Systems Engineering, 60(6), pp.563-569.
Davenport, T. and Harris, J., 2017. Competing on analytics: Updated, with a new
introduction: The new science of winning. Harvard Business Press.
Gurel, E. and Tat, M., 2017. SWOT analysis: A theoretical review. Journal of International
Social Research, 10(51).
Lee, M., 2019. Alphabet: The Becoming of Google. Routledge.
Martin, V. (2019) How Amazon could become the real threat to Alphabet Stock. [online]
Available from: https://investorplace.com/2019/04/amazon-real-threat-alphabet-stock/
(Accessed 24 July 2019).
Noe, R.A., Hollenbeck, J.R., Gerhart, B. and Wright, P.M., 2017. Human resource
management: Gaining a competitive advantage. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Phadermrod, B., Crowder, R.M. and Wills, G.B., 2019. Importance-performance analysis
based SWOT analysis. International Journal of Information Management, 44, pp.194-203.
Shchurina, S. V., & Mustafina, E. F. (2018). Dividend Policy and Its Influence on the Cost of
Capital. Journal of Reviews on Global Economics, 7, 790-796.
Tidd, J. and Bessant, J.R., 2018. Managing innovation: integrating technological, market
and organizational change. John Wiley & Sons.
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Tidd, J. and Bessant, J.R., 2018. Managing innovation: integrating technological, market
and organizational change. John Wiley & Sons.
Wei, L., 2016. Research on Google’s brand performance. Journal of Service Science
Research, 8(2), pp.161-175.
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