Facebook Strategy Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Use Porters five forces model to analyse an industry on the basis of the five competitive forces.
- Analyse the global social networking industry and how the five forces have affected Facebook and rival firms and the impact on industry structure, attractiveness, and profitability.
- Understand how Facebook has managed to defend against intense competition and the strategies it uses to create 'blue oceans' that are defensible, helping it capture market share and maintain competitive advantage.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Facebook is an American social media and social networking company with its headquarters in Menlo park, California, United States. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Barr 2018).
Subsidiaries include Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Onavo, LiveRail, among others. In 2017, Facebook recorded annual revenue of $40.65 billion, up from $27.64billion in 2016 according to Statista (2018c). The social media giant also recorded $15.934billion profit in 2017, up from $10.217billion in 2016 (Statista 2018d).
In the following sections, we examine Facebook Porters five forces to try and understand how even though Facebook has created barriers that currently protect its market share, it still remains vulnerable to new players who could take advantage of its privacy issues to exacerbate an exodus of more than 3 million teens that’s already underway in the core markets of the UK and US. It is already locked out of the world’s most populous country, a situation exacerbated by China-USA trade war tensions. So while Facebook still wields power over the forces of vertical competition (power of buyers and suppliers), the horizontal forces of competition (competition from rivals, substitutes and new entry) exert enough pressure on the industry to limit profitability and further dominance of Facebook in the future.