STUDY CASE: Say 'Charge It' with Your Cell Phone

Questions:

1. Do you view this technology as a potential threat to traditional telephone companies? If so, what counterstrategies could traditional telephone companies adopt to prepare for this technology?
2. Using Porter's Five Forces describe the barriers to entry for this new technology.
3. Which of Porter's three generic strategies is the new technology following?
4. Describe the value chain of the business of using cell phones as a payment method.
5. What types of regulatory issues might occur due to this type of technology?

Answers:

1. No, because traditional telephone companies will focus on other sector, such as handphone that focus to elderly people. One of the company that focus in this sector in Inomobile Company. this company had launched handphone for elderly people. The counterstrategies could traditional telephone companies do is use the three generics strategies which is focused strategy that is target to a niche market.It concentrate on differentiation. Such as F8 model.

General Specification

Operating Frequency: GSM900/1800MHz
Dimensions (mm): 102*48.5*14.5mm
Talk Time (mins): 130-300 mins
Storage Capability: 32MB NorFlash
Screen Size: 1.6 inch
Pixel Resolution: 128*48
Ringtone: 16 tones polyphonic

Key Experiences

Candybar design
MONO Display
Smart design for the elderly
Super big key design
Build in Speakerphone
Electric torch light
Digital time announcer
Shortcut dialing
SOS emergency call

        2.  The barriers to entry for this new technology:

•    For supplier.

                 Suppliers power will become low when many competitors. For example Samsung and Apple, they have same product which approximately similar that focus on the touchscreen smartphones. 

•    For buyers

                      Buyers power is higher because buyers have many choices to buy the product in the market. When to advance in technology, the community will due to the lack of interaction with people. 

• Threats of Substitutes Product and Service

                      Usually, an telephone companies would like to be on a market in which there are few substitutes of their product or services. Such as, latterly an Apple company had launched their iPhone 5 in Malaysia which offer a network mobile in 4G.

• Threat a new entrants 

                     It is the Porter's five forces the barriers to entry for this new technology. They want to introduce and attract people to buy their product. for example Motorola. event Motorola product producing traditional mobile product to compete with other company. 

• Rivalry among existence competitors 

                     They do not think about another advanced product. for example, product already have in market, they just focus to compete with each other and to produce the same product like touch screen smartphone.
 

6. It is porter three generic strategic in the new technology. Differentiation in their products can help the company to create competitive advantages by distinguishing their products on one or more features important to their customers such as BLACKBERRY and I-PHONE. For blackberry the company focus more to the unique the products by using the track-pad and button keyboard but i-phone refer to touched screen phone.

4. The value chain of business of using cell phone as a payment method such smartphone like android. this diagram show the flow of using cell phone as a payment method.

5. The regulatory issues might occur due to this type of technology is fraud. for example, is using others people credit cards to make transaction, children can use their parents credit card. For supplier side, they will make double charges without customer knowledge.