Strategy: Managing Competitive Advantage 2nd Half – Spring 2013/2014

Write Up 2
“Kent Chemical: Organizing for
International Growth”

Sara Alves Ribeiro Goulão
Nº1937
On the “Kent Chemical: Organizing for International Growth” case you assume the role of the consultant reporting on what is going on in the company as a previous step to assess the assignment that they have given you. Please, answer the following questions:
a) What were the problems facing Luis Morales as he began implementing Ben Fisher’s international expansion strategy?
Kent Chemical Product’s result show that 35% of its sales are from overseas operations and these international activities seem to be a potential source to increment sales. Due …show more content…

In other words, the regional staff was ineffective and so was not able to create a significant value within the subsidiaries.
These several problems of communication, cooperation and coordination lead to a conflicted management, which might have aroused from the absence of strategic leaders in the company that did not focus only on the domestic operations. A competitive advantage is an advantage that a firm has over its competitors, allowing it to generate greater sales or margins and/or retain more customers than its competition. However, with all the issues mentioned above, even if this new integration strategy was expected to create value, it was very difficult to Kent Chemical to improve its competitive advantage. In other words, with such many conflicts, the organization, probably, was not capable to leverage its sources better than its competitors. Even if there is no data available from KC competitors, there is available the information needed to observe that the organization was not able to add value to its value chain; as can be seen the Summary of Financial Data from the company, even if sales increased from $578 millions to $598 millions, the Net Income decreased from $38 millions to $24