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8: Preparing your export plan > Revisiting the
export SWOT analysis of the firm |
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Revisiting the export SWOT analysis of
the firm
What is a SWOT analysis?
What is a SWOT analysis? SWOT stands for
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and this
analysis is a review undertaken by management or the owner
of how these factors impact upon the business. A SWOT analysis
is a standard management exercise that should be undertaken
in all firms when planning their business activities. An
export SWOT analysis simply applies the SWOT analysis to
the firm's export endeavours and looks at the firm in the
context of its internal and external environments. In other
words, as the export manager you will consider and write
down what you believe your firm's strengths and weaknesses
to be and what opportunities and threats your firm faces
from an exporting perspective (presumably your export SWOT
analysis will closely relate to your general business SWOT
analysis, but will extend the analysis to the international
market).
SWOT: an internal and external view of
the firm
It is very important to understand that strengths
and weaknesses are internal to the firm, while opportunities
and threats are external to the firm. Strengths, for example,
might be that your firm has a unique product or staff that
speak several foreign languages, or that your company has
a very low-cost production system. Weaknesses, on the other
hand, might be that you have little understanding of exports,
that your products are designed specifically for the local
market or that you have very little spare production capacity.
Turning to opportunities, these might include,
for example, that the world market is experiencing a major
growth in and shortage of the product that you produce,
or that some major global producer has stopped producing
the product that you manufacture or that the
The purpose of the export SWOT analysis
The purpose of the SWOT analysis is simply
to get you to think about the factors, both internal and
external, that are likely to have an impact upon your business,
either positively (strengths and opportunities) or negatively
(weaknesses and threats). Once you have identified these
factors, you can begin to plan to either take advantage
of the positive factors or to defend against the negative
factors.
How to do your SWOT analysis
We have provided you with an export SWOT
checklist that you can download and complete. This is essentially
a long list of factors both internal and external that
may or may not impact upon your business. Your task is
to work through this list and to decide for each factor
what the impact is like to be on your business (whether
positive, negative or neutral), as well as the likely extent
of the impact (significant or minor). Clearly, once you
have completed this task, the next step is to concentrate
on the positives and negatives - especially those that
will have a significant influence on business performance
- and then to take appropriate action in terms of how you
plan your marketing strategy to deal with these issues.
Download the export SWOT checklist |
