Porter's Five Forces Model

Porter’s 5-Forces Model: A method for examining the competitive environment for a company or industry. It specifies and evaluates threats from new entrants, suppliers, buyers, and substitutes in the arena of competition.

The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is the largest bank in Canada based on market capitalization. The bank was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1864 with the name, Merchants’ Bank of Halifax. Throughout the years, it has expanded globally through their offices in Canada, the U.S. and 49 other countries around the world. Royal Bank entered the 1990’s financially stable regardless of the severe economic challenges of the 1980’s. This allowed them to make strategic acquisitions of companies which paved the way for their transformation from retail bank to global financial services.

Porter 's five forces framework assesses the competitive pressures a company faces within the industry. The five forces of competitive pressure include: competition from rival sellers, competition from potential new entrants to the industry, competition from producers of substitute products, supplier bargaining power and customer bargaining power. The model helps us determine the strength of competitive pressures and profitability of an industry. [3]

Porter's Five Forces is a simple but powerful tool that consist of 5 different forces to understand the competitiveness of your business environment, and for identifying your strategy's potential profitability. The five forces are degree of rivalry, threat of entry, threat of substitutions, buyer power, and supplier power. Each force is helpful in their own way to get to know your rivals a lot better and get to know what can happen in your market.

Porter 's Five Forces Model is a critical instrument to break down an outer aggressive environment of the business. The model incorporates threat of entry, the threat of rivalry, the threat of suppliers, the threat of purchasers and threat of substitutes.

Porter’s Five Forces is a framework that consists of five competitive forces, threat of entry, power of supplier and buyer, threat of substitution and competitive rivalry. These forces facilitate the analysis of the task environment of an industry or company (Wheelen and Hunger, 2009).

The Porter Five forces analysis helps the marketer to contrast a competitive environment. Porter’s five forces model is comprised of following five completive forces:

I am a registered nurse employed in a hospital in the healthcare industry. Porter’s five forces model begins with the first force being the intensity of rivalry among incumbent firms (Parnell, 2014). Competition in healthcare, particularly hospitals, is limited. Due to the accredidation process, government regulations such as a certificate of need (Certificate of need, n.d.) and licensing of facilities and providers, competition is limited. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at ways to increase competition in healthcare such as opening up opportunities for nurse practitioners, increasing the availability of such technologies as telehealth and establish more competitive healthcare pricing. In cities, there is more of a concentration of competitors. The hospital that I work at is the largest between Memphis and Nashville and has the busiest ER in the state of Tennessee. Therefore, the concentration of competition is low for that particular hospital. There are high fixed costs with a hospital such as buildings, overhead, equipment, and salaried personnel. Yet, a hospital does not cut their prices to increase patient census. However, it could be questionable in a low census period as to whether there are additional tests run or hospital admissions that would ordinarily not happen if the census were higher. There is strong growth in the healthcare industry with the industry growing at twice the rate of the national economy (Health Care Industry, 2012).

This part of the research covers a brief information on Porter’s and his five forces model, a number of critiques to the model , examples of a noncompetitive organization applied Porter’s model , and discussion on Grant suggestion to complete Porter’s model.

A model of pure competition implies that risk adjusted rates of return should be constant across all the firms and industries. However there are various economic studies have affirmed that different industries can sustain different levels of profitability part of this difference is explained by industry structure.

Porter describes the five forces analysis as a market analysis tool to define the industry structure. Porter identifies the Five forces, as the potential entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threats of substitutes and the industry competitors (Porter, 1997).

Porter’s 5 Forces analysis is a commonly used business theory that identifies the 5 competitive forces of an industry. By identifying and analysing these forces you can determine an industries weaknesses and strengths. Porter recognised the 5 forces in most business markets to be internal rivalry, entry, substitutes and compliments, supplier power and buyer power.

Porter's Five Forces model was used in many different industries.The five forces are threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products or services, bargaining power of customers (buyers), bargaining power of suppliers, intensity of competitive rivalry. This theory is based on the concept that there are five forces that determine the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market. Porter’s five forces help to identify where power lies in a business situation. This is useful both in understanding the strength of an organisation’s current competitive position, and the strength of a position that an organisation may

Porter’s five forces are used to determine the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market. These are close forces that affect a company’s ability to make a profit and serve customers. If any of these forces change, a company must reassess its marketplace. The five forces include: the threat of substitute products, the threat of the entry of new competitors, the intensity of competitive rivalry, the bargaining power of customers and the bargaining power of suppliers.

The Porter`s five forces are threats of new entrants, the bargaining power of buyers ,product substitution and intensity of rival of rival among competitors .These forces measure the competitiveness of the market and also helps the company to identify strategies to use to penetrate such and gain market share.