Global Business Environment: Sainsbury's SWOT and Key Driver Analysis

This report presents a SWOT analysis of Sainsbury's, a major UK supermarket chain, examining its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the global business environment. The report highlights Sainsbury's strengths, such as its brand recognition, expansion strategies, large employee base, and customer-focused strategies, while also addressing weaknesses, including higher product prices and slower global expansion. It identifies opportunities in rural market expansion and growth in developing countries, while also acknowledging threats from competitors, globalization, and cybersecurity. Furthermore, the report analyzes how key drivers identified in the SWOT analysis impact Sainsbury's marketing and human resource management (HRM) functions, emphasizing the importance of brand image, technology, and employee strength to overall success. The analysis considers how the company can leverage its strengths and opportunities, and mitigate its weaknesses and threats, to improve its competitive position and achieve its business objectives.

SWOT & Key drivers impact on the
Mk & HR company areas

Executive summary
In this report SWOT analysis of Sainsbury Company is explained, the importance
of the implementation of this strategic tool in overall planning and formulation of various
management strategies for company. This report also discussed effects of internal
factors on the company's overall success and implementation of various strategies to
combat the threats and weakness. How the company has utilized the strengths and
opportunities to its utmost usage. This report also explains how the key drivers have
affected marketing and human resource management functional areas in Sainsbury.

Table of Contents.
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................4
SWOT ANALYSIS.....................................................................................................................4
DRIVERS AFFECTING TWO FUNCTIONAL AREAS........................................................6
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Swot analysis is a framework used to evaluate company's competitive position
and to develop strategic planning policies keeping the company's strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities and threats in mind. In this report Sainsbury has been taken
as an organization for SWOT analysis, the internal factors affecting its business
strategies for effective management in business growth and future potentialities as key
criteria for evaluation. It also explains the impact of key drivers on two of the most
important functional areas which are marketing and HRM.
SWOT ANALYSIS
Strengths:
 Sainsbury is recognized as one of the largest supermarket brands in whole UK.
Sainsbury's appropriate expansion strategy helped them to grow from having
small stores which had few products to supermarkets that fulfilled daily needs of
customers, this supermarket is also now among top 4 brands in UK.
 Sainsbury is known to have great business attitude which helped their customers
to live comfortably (Ike, 2016). Sainsbury has attracted new customers and
retained old ones of every economic category, by adapting cheap and sustaining
product strategies.
 Sainsbury has an impressive employee strength of around 150K. In UK alone,
Sainsbury have 600+ supermarkets and 800+ stores. Sainsbury also have many
customers who are loyal to the brand and are dependent on Sainsbury only for
their daily needs.
 Sainsbury also designed unique coupons which are based on research data
collected from customers according to their daily needs and shopping
experiences. The company also adapted attractive promotional strategies, which
resulted in eliminating competitions and making Sainsbury's products unique and
cheapest. The company has also made it to London Stock Exchange and FTSE.
Weaknesses:

 Various researchers claimed that Sainsbury product's prices are higher in
comparison to its competitors. This may be due to increasing food prices
globally.
 Also, Sainsbury being one of the oldest brand in UK, didn't expand their
business globally earlier to take lead in market share. Sainsbury also had some
issues within internal management of company, due to which they had to suffer
losses.
 Sainsbury also delayed in making necessary changes to their policies/strategies.
Sainsbury also faced challenges in retaining customers, they don't possess
appropriate strategy to deal with that.
Opportunities:
 At present, villages/rural areas also use branded products, resulting in more and
more supermarket and retail stores opening in rural areas. This is a great
opportunity for Sainsbury to spread their products to these remote areas too.
 Also, there is great opportunity for the company to expand domestically and
globally in developing countries such as China, India etc. These countries are
known to have the largest population of the world, these countries will also
provide cheap labour.
 They can enter into these markets through partnerships or joint ventures
(Hopkin, 2018). Sainsbury can also install self- checkout machines which will be
operating full day, it will help in boosting profits.
Threats:
 Competitors of Sainsbury may halt their business growth. Some competitors are
even proving best in class products in cheaper prices then which are offered by
Sainsbury. To deal with competitors, company has to always offer valuable
product/services at reasonable/affordable prices in comparison to its competitors.
 Ever increasing globalization can possess both threats and opportunities for
Sainsbury (Abdalla, 2017). Also, due to uncertainty after Brexit, Sainsbury may
have to deal with bad times ahead.
 Sainsbury also have to develop appropriate strategy to deal with cyber-attacks,
because the company has invested heavily in infrastructure in order to reach

maximum customers. In 2010, company had to deal with system malfunctioning
which resulted in heavy losses, so they also have to take care of that in the future
and plan accordingly.
DRIVERS AFFECTING TWO FUNCTIONAL AREAS
The key drivers of SWOT analysis and PESTLE explained above for Sainsbury
Company would affect the functional areas such as Marketing and HRM of company in
various ways for promoting its brand name globally and formulation of business
strategies.
MARKETING:
Strong brand image- Sainsbury has created a strong brand image in the retail
consumer market with the vision to be the most trusted brand when it comes to
offering customers best shopping experience (Hopkin,2018).The marketing
department uses this strength at utmost advantage for offering a large variety of
products including grocery and other comfort services for its consumers.
Effective technology- Sainsbury believes in enhancing the technology it uses in all
products and services with the advancement of time and competitive growth of
brands in marketplace. Marketing function is largely affected by technology as it
speeds up the total processing time of products, great availability and customer
satisfaction.
Appropriate business attitude- Sainsbury works with an appropriate business
attitude where all principles of effective marketing are taken care of. The marketing
function keeps the goal of company to provide good affordable price range among
all its users with great services and outstanding quality at a competitive cost.
Competitive market- Sainsbury keeps in mind the competitive factor while
performing the marketing function, there are large number of competitive brands
emerging in UK and globally which gives company a tough competition (Ike, 2016).It
needs to formulate attractive marketing approaches to remain the leader in retail
industry.
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT:
 Increased productivity– Sainsbury while working on the human resource
management function focuses on the expertise with increased productivity for an

increase in sales and winning the trust of consumers through great quality and
value services.
 Performance- Sainsbury focuses the human resources to succeed in the
completive market and develop an edge of the best modern retailer brand when it
comes to provide customer satisfaction (Todorov and Akbar,2019).By harnessing
the energy, creativity and talent of its performance, it makes sure all human
resources are working skilfully.
 Employee strength- Sainsbury has a large talented skilled employee strength
which works as an important key driver for the human resource function. Their
interests and needs are taken care of by the company, proper motivation for
bringing higher levels of results from them is provided.
 Compensation- Sainsbury follows an effective compensation strategy for the
human resource function, by giving proper performance appraisals to them and
various incentives for enhancing their morale levels and satisfaction, thus
retaining them in company.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Abdalla, E., 2017. Import and Export Strategies to Sustain Business Under Economic
Sanctions.
FATRICIA, R.S., 2016. SWOT ANALYSIS OF SAINSBURY’S SUPERMARKET. Jurnal
Manajemen Terapan dan Keuangan 5(1).
Hopkin, P., 2018. Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and
implementing effective risk management. Kogan Page Publishers.
Ike, L., 2016. Management: Principles & Techniques. Xlibris Corporation.
Todorov, K. and Akbar, Y.H. 2019. Prelims', Strategic Management in Emerging
Markets.
Wilton, N., 2016. An introduction to human resource management. Sage.