International Business Environment Report Assignment

Introduction

In the event that the business is deciding to the foreign market or launching a new product, business owners require into account several factors and understand the greater forces shaping their selections (Lewis and Gates, 2005). One of the best ways to measure any decision is to carry out a PEST, Political, Financial, and Social and Technical analysis.

Any successful small business requires understanding that political, environmental and cultural issues range from country to country. This implies you need to have a thorough understanding of the marketplace you are about to offer with. At the same time, PEST helps you understand how the mechanics of one market may impact the dynamics of another (Czinkota et al. 2009). I want to closely look at what PEST analysis really is and how it can optimize your business.

PESTEL analysis is an important and widely used tool that helps show big picture of a firm's external environment, specifically as related to international markets. PESTEL is an acronym for the politics, economic, sociocultural, technological, environmental, and legal contexts where a firm operates. A PESTEL analysis helps executives gain an improved understanding of the opportunities and hazards they face; consequently, the analysis helps with building an improved vision for the future business landscape and how the firm might compete profitably (Wild et al. 2014). This useful tool analyses for market growth or decline and, therefore, the position, potential, and direction for an enterprise. When a firm is considering entry into new markets, these factors are of considerable importance. In addition, PESTEL analysis provides information into the status of key market flatteners, both in conditions with their present state and future trends.

As stated by Kurtz and Boone, (2008), Firms need to know the microenvironment to ensure that their strategy is aligned with the powerful forces of change impacting their business landscape. Once organizations exploit a change in the environment--rather than simply survive or resist?  ?  Disobey the change--they are more likely to be successful. A solid knowledge of PESTEL also helps managers avoid strategies that may be doomed to get damaged given the circumstances of the planet. JC Penney's failed entrance into Chile is a case in point.

Finally, understanding PESTEL is critical prior to entry into a brand new country or region. The truth that a strategy is congruent with PESTEL in the home environment gives no assurance it can easily also align in other countries. For instance, when Lands' End, the internet clothier, sought to expand the functions into Germany, it ran into local regulations prohibiting it from offering unconditional guarantees on it is products. In the Unified States, Lands' End acquired built a reputation for quality on its no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. However, this is considered against the law under Germany's regulations governing incentive offers and price discounts (Glowik, 2017). The political skirmish between Lands' End and the German born government finally ended when the regulations banning complete, utter, absolute, wholehearted guarantees were abolished. Even though the restrictive regulations didn't put Lands' End out of business in Germany, they did inhibit its expansion there until the regulations were abolished.

There is housing in the PESTEL analysis. First, consider the relevance of each of the PESTEL factors to your context. Next, identify and categorize the information that applies to these factors. Finally, analyse the info and draw conclusions. Prevalent mistakes in this evaluation include stopping at the other step or assuming that the first analysis and a conclusion are correct without examining the assumptions and examining alternative scenarios (Knight and Kim, 2009, p. 261).

The platform for PESTEL analysis is presented below. It's consisting of six sections--one for every single of the PESTEL titles. The framework includes test questions or prompts, the answers that can help determine the size of opportunities and threats in the macro environment. These questions are examples of the types of problems that can arise in a PESTEL analysis.

Objectives

In this assignment the learning objectives are:

Knowing the components of PESTEL analysis and understanding why import can be a stealthy form to enter internationally.

Recognizing relation between globalization and PESTEL

PESTEL Analysis

Political

• What are the country’s social-welfare policies?
• What are the country’s foreign-trade regulations?
• Is the government involved in trading agreements, such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?
• What are the local taxation policies? How do these affect your business?
• How stable is the political environment in the prospective country?

Economic

• What are the current exchange rates between critical markets, and how will they affect production and distribution of your goods?
• What are the long-term prospects for the country’s economy, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and other economic factors?
• What are local employment levels per capita, and how are they changing?
• What is the current level of inflation in the prospective country? What is it forecast to be? How does this affect the possible growth of your market?
• What are the current and forecast interest rates?

Sociocultural

• What are the attitudes toward work and leisure?
• What pending legislation could affect corporate social policies (e.g., domestic-partner benefits or maternity and paternity leave)?
• What is the level of consumerism, and what are the popular attitudes toward it?
• What are the dominant local religions, and what influence do they have on consumer attitudes and opinions?
• What is the level and distribution of education and income?
• What are the country’s current demographics, and how are they changing?
• What are the local lifestyle trends?

Technological

• Are potentially disruptive technologies in adjacent industries creeping in at the edges of the focal industry?
• What is the status of intellectual property issues in the local environment?
• How mature is the technology?
• What is the local governments and industry’s level of interest and focus on technology?
• To what level do the local government and industry fund research, and are those levels changing?

Environmental

• What are the regulations regarding waste disposal and energy consumption?
• Are there environmental-protection laws?
• How do the activities of international activist groups (e.g., Greenpeace, Earth First!, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA]) affect your business?
• Are there any pending ecological or environmental issues relevant to your industry?
• What are the local environmental issues?

Legal

• What is the status of employment, health and safety, and product safety laws?
• Are there relevant consumer laws?
• Does intellectual property have legal protections?
• What are the local government’s regulations regarding monopolies and private property?

Political Factors

The political environment may have a significant impact on businesses. In addition, political factors affect consumer confidence and consumer and business spending. For example, how stable is the politics environment? This is specifically important for companies getting into new markets. Government procedures on regulation and taxation can differ from state to state and across countrywide boundaries. Political considerations also encompass trade treaties, such as NAFTA, ASEAN, and EU (Doh, 2005, p. 699). Such treaties usually favour trade among the member countries but inflict penalties or less advantageous trade conditions on non-members.

Economic Factors

Managers also need to consider macroeconomic factors that will have near-term and long-term results on the success of their strategy. Inflation rates, rates of interest, tariffs, the expansion of the area and overseas national economies, and exchange rates are critical. Being out of work, availability of critical work force, labour force, and the local price of labour also have a strong bearing on strategy, particularly as related to the location of disparate business functions and facilities (Kennerley and Neely, 2003, p. 217).

Sociocultural Factors

The social and cultural impact on business varies from country to country. Depending on the sort of business, factors including the local languages, the dominant religions, the ethnical views toward leisure time, and the age and lifespan demographics may be critical. Local sociocultural characteristics also include attitudes toward consumerism, environmentalism, and the roles of men and women in society (Halinen and Törnroos, 2005, p. 1289). Pertaining to example, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have grown in international markets due to the increasing level of consumerism outside the United Claims. Coca-Cola is using their appeal to global consumers throughout its marketing work.

Making assumptions about local norms derived from experience at home market is a common cause of early on failure when entering new markets. However, even home-market norms can change as time passes, often caused by changing demographics due to migrants or aging populations.

Technological Factors

The critical role of technology is talked about in more detail later in this section. Intended for now, suffice it to say that technological factors have an important bearing on the threats and opportunities organizations encounter. For example, new technology may make it possible for products and services to be made more cheaply also to an improved standard of quality. New technology may also provide the chance for more progressive products and services, such as online trading and investing and remote working (Grünig and Morschett, 2017, p. 89).

Environmental Factors

The environment has long been one factor in firm strategy, mostly from the standpoint of gain access to raw materials. Significantly, this factor is best viewed as both a direct and indirect cost for the firm.

Environmental factors are also examined on the footprint kept by a firm on its respective surroundings. Pertaining to consumer-product companies like PepsiCo, for instance, this can encompass the waste-management and organic-farming practices used in the countries where uncooked materials are obtained (Grünig and Morschett, 2017, p. 151). In the same way, in consumer markets, it could refer to the level to which packaging is biodegradable or recyclable.

Legal Factors

Finally, legal factors reflect the regulations relevant to the region and the corporation. Legal factors can include if the rule of law is well founded, how easily or quickly laws and regulations may change, and what the costs of regulatory conformity are (Bullough et al. 2017, p. 217). For example, Coca-Cola's market share in the European countries is greater than 40 percent; as an effect, regulators have asked that the business give shelf space in the coolers to competitive products in order to provide greater consumer choice.

Many of the PESTEL factors are related. For instance, the legal environment is often related to the political environment, where laws and rules can only change when they're steady with the political will.

PESTEL and Globalization

Over the previous decade, new markets have been opened to overseas competitors, whole industries have been deregulated, and state-run enterprises have been privatized. Therefore, globalization has become a fact of life in almost every industry. This entails much more than companies simply transferring products overseas. Some industrial sectors that aren't normally considered global do, in reality, have strictly domestic players. But these companies often compete alongside companies with functions in multiple countries; in many cases, both sets of companies are doing equally well. In distinction, in a truly global industry, the core method standardized, the marketing strategy is relatively uniform, and competitive strategies are included in several international markets (Cantwell, 2017, p. 47). In these industries, competitive benefit plainly is one of the businesses that can contend globally.

A number of factors reveal whether an industry has globalized or is in the process of globalizing. The sidebar below group’s globalization factors into four categories: market segments, costs, governments, and competition. These dimensions correspond well to Thomas Friedman's flatteners (as described in his book The World Is definitely Flat), though they are not exhaustive.

Factors Favouring Industry Globalization

Some of the factors that favour industry globalization are Global competitors, interdependent countries, competition, marketing regulations, common manufacturing, common technological standards, Favourable trade policies, governments, High research-and-development (R&D) costs, Arbitrage opportunities, Favourable logistics, Sourcing efficiencies, experiences and learning, large-scope and large-scale economies, costs, transferable marketing approaches, global channels, Global customer needs, Homogeneous customer needs and markets (Likoko and Kini, 2017, p. 86).

Markets

The more similar markets in various regions are, the better the pressure for an industry to globalize. Skolt and PepsiCo, for example, are fairly uniform around the world because the demand for fizzy drinks is typically the same in each and every country. The airframe-manufacturing industry, took over by Boeing and Airbus, also has a highly uniform market for the products; airlines around the globe have the same needs in regards to large commercial aircraft (Muralidharan and Pathak, 2017, p. 291).

Costs

In both of these industries, costs favour globalization. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo realize economies of range and scale because they make such huge assets in marketing and promo. As they are promoting coherent images and brands, they can leverage their marketing us dollars throughout the world. Similarly, Boeing and Airbus can spend millions in new-product R&D because the global market for their products is so large (Bayraktar et al. 2017, p. 41).

Governments and Competition

Obviously, favourable control policies encourage the positive effect of markets and sectors. Governments, however, can also play a critical role in globalization by figuring out and regulating technological requirements. Railroad gauge--the distance involving the two steel tracks--would seem to be to favour a simple technological standard (Ekinci, 2017, p. 13). In The country of Spain, however, the gauge is wider within France. So, why? Because in the 1850s, when Spain and nearby France were hostile to one another, the Romance language government decided that making Spanish railways incompatible with French railways would impede any French invasion.

These kinds of are a few key drivers of industry change. However, therefore implications of technological and business-model innovations for both the rate and extent of industry change (Qi et al. 2017, p. 167). The rate of change may vary significantly from one industry to the next; for illustration, the computing industry changes much quicker than the metal industry. Nevertheless, change in both fields has caused complete reconfigurations of industry structure and the competitive positions of numerous players. The idea that all sectors change over time and that business environments are in a regular state of flux is actually intuitive. Because a strategic decision developer, you need to ask yourself this question: how accurately does current industry structure (which is relatively easy to identify) anticipate future industry conditions? (Helo et al. 2017, p. 41).

Posting as a Stealth Kind of Internationalization

Ironically, the drivers of globalization have also given rise to a greater amount of imports. Globalization in this sense is a very strong flattener. Importing involves the sale of goods or services in one country that are sourced around the globe. In many ways, adding is a stealth form of internationalization. Firms often claim that they may have no international functions and yet--directly or indirectly--base their production or services on inputs obtained from outside their house country (Prakash et al. 2017, p. 88). Firms that take part in adding must learn about traditions requirements, informed compliance with customs regulations, entry of products, invoices, classification and value, determination and analysis of duty, special requirements, fraud, marketing, trade funding and insurance, and international trade zones. Importing can take many forms--from the sourcing of components, machines, and unprocessed trash to the purchase of finished goods for domestic resale and the outsourcing of creation or services to nondomestic providers.

Outsourcing through offshoring

Outsourcing occurs when a company contracts with a 3rd party to carry out some work on their behalf. The outsourcer may do the work within the same country or may take the work overseas (i. e., offshoring). Offshoring occurs when you require a function out of your country of property to be performed in another country, generally at a lower cost. Essential outsourcing, or outsourcing work to a nondomestic 3rd parties, is becoming very noticeable in business and company strategy in recent years (Eling and Schaper, 2017, p. 1083).

Nevertheless it's not a new phenomenon; for decades, Coleman has been designing shoes and other apparel that are produced abroad. In the same way, Pacific Cycle doesn't make a single Schwinn or Mongoose bicycle in America but instead imports them totally from manufacturers in Taiwan and China. It might appear as if international freelancing is new because companies are now more often freelancing services, components, and organic materials from countries with developing economies (e. g., China, Brazil, and India).

In addition to factors of production, information systems (IT)--such as telecommunications and the widespread diffusion of the Internet--have provided the impetus for outsourcing services. Business-process outsourcing (BPO) is the delegation of just one or more IT-intensive business techniques to an external company that in turn is the owner of, administers, and manages the selected process on such basis as identified and measurable performance conditions (Leonidou et al. 2017, p. 31) The companies operating and IT-intensive industries--insurance, banking, drugs, telecommunications, automotive, and airlines--are among the early adopters of BPO. Of these, insurance and banking are able to generate the bulk of the personal savings, purely as a result of large amount of processes that they can outsource (i. electronic. the processing of statements and loans and providing service through call centres). Among those countries real estate BPO operations, India experienced the most dramatic progress in services where vocabulary skills and education were important (Peris-Ortiz and Ferreira, 2017, p. 8). In the year 2013, Research firm Gartner anticipates that the BPO market in India will reach 1.8 million dollars.

Generally, international outsourcing locations tend to be defined by how automated a production process or service can be made and the travel costs involved. When transport costs and automation are both high, then your knowledge worker component of the positioning calculation becomes less important. You can see how you might employ the CAGE framework to gauge potential outsourcing locations. Occasionally, though, businesses invest in both plant equipment and ideal to start and development of the local workforce. This becomes important when the much wider labour force should have a higher level of education to control complex plant equipment or because a business's specific technologies also have a cultural component (Salminen et al. 2017, p. 309). Brazil is one case in point; Ford, BMW, Daimler motor company, and Cargill have all made substantial purchases of the educational infrastructure of this significant, emerging overall economy.

Conclusion

A PESTEL analysis examines a focus on market's political, economic, sociable, technological, environmental, and legal dimensions in conditions of both its current express and possible trends. A great understanding of the proportions of PESTEL can help you better grasp the dimensions on what a target market or industry may be more global or local. Posting is a stealth form of international entry, because the factors that benefit globalization can also lead to a higher degree of imports, and inputs can be sourced from everywhere they have either the lowest cost, highest quality, or some blend of those characteristics.

Reference List:

Books

Czinkota, M.R., Ronkainen, I., Moffett, M.H., Marinova, S. and Marinov, M., 2009. International business. Wiley.

Glowik, M., 2017. Global Strategy in the Service Industries: Dynamics, Analysis, Growth. Routledge.

Kurtz, D.L. and Boone, L.E., 2008. Contemporary business. Cengage Learning.

Lewis, R.D. and Gates, M., 2005. Leading Across Cultures. Nicholas Brealey.

Wild, J., Wild, K.L. and Han, J.C., 2014. International business. Pearson Education Limited.

Journals

Bayraktar, C.A., Hancerliogullari, G., Cetinguc, B. and Calisir, F., 2017. Competitive strategies, innovation, and firm performance: an empirical study in a developing economy environment. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 29(1), pp.38-52.

Bullough, A., Bullough, A., Moore, F., Moore, F., Kalafatoglu, T. and Kalafatoglu, T., 2017. Research on women in international business and management: then, now, and next. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, 24(2), pp.211-230.

Cantwell, J., 2017. Innovation and international business. Industry and Innovation, 24(1), pp.41-60.

Doh, J.P., 2005. Offshore outsourcing: Implications for international business and strategic management theory and practice. Journal of Management Studies, 42(3), pp.695-704.

Ekinci, M.F., 2017. Inattentive consumers and international business cycles. Journal of International Money and Finance, 72, pp.1-27.

Eling, M. and Schaper, P., 2017. Under pressure: how the business environment affects productivity and efficiency of European life insurance companies. European Journal of Operational Research, 258(3), pp.1082-1094.

Grünig, R. and Morschett, D., 2017. Determining Suitable Location-Operation Mode Combinations. In Developing International Strategies (pp. 147-165). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Grünig, R. and Morschett, D., 2017. Determining the Target Markets. In Developing International Strategies (pp. 85-104). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Halinen, A. and Törnroos, J.Å., 2005. Using case methods in the study of contemporary business networks. Journal of Business Research, 58(9), pp.1285-1297.

Helo, P., Gunasekaran, A. and Rymaszewska, A., 2017. Improving Marketing and Operations Strategy Through Industrial Services. In Designing and Managing Industrial Product-Service Systems (pp. 37-42). Springer International Publishing.

Kennerley, M. and Neely, A., 2003. Measuring performance in a changing business environment. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 23(2), pp.213-229.

Knight, G.A. and Kim, D., 2009. International business competence and the contemporary firm. Journal of International Business Studies, 40(2), pp.255-273.

Leonidou, L.C., Aykol, B., Fotiadis, T.A., Christodoulides, P. and Zeriti, A., 2017. Betrayal in international buyer-seller relationships: Its drivers and performance implications. Journal of World Business, 52(1), pp.28-44.

Likoko, E. and Kini, J., 2017. Inclusive business—a business approach to development. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 24, pp.84-88.

Muralidharan, E. and Pathak, S., 2017. Informal institutions and international entrepreneurship. International Business Review, 26(2), pp.288-302.

Peris-Ortiz, M. and Ferreira, J.J., 2017. Cooperation and Networks in Small Business Strategy: An Overview. In Cooperative and Networking Strategies in Small Business (pp. 1-9). Springer International Publishing.

Prakash, A., Prakash, A., Jha, S.K., Jha, S.K., Prasad, K.D., Prasad, K.D., Singh, A.K. and Singh, A.K., 2017. Productivity, quality and business performance: an empirical study. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 66(1), pp.78-91.

Qi, Y., Huo, B., Wang, Z. and Yeung, H.Y.J., 2017. The impact of operations and supply chain strategies on integration and performance. International Journal of Production Economics, 185, pp.162-174.

Salminen, V., Ruohomaa, H. and Koivisto, T., 2017. Integrated Service and Product Innovation on Life Cycle Business Co-evolution. In Advances in Human Factors, Business Management, Training and Education (pp. 301-313). Springer International Publishing.