Azza Fahmy Jewellery Case Study

Vision, mission, objectives and strategies

Azza Fahmy Jewellery, based on its inception, has a well crafted vision, enriched with its call into service, and the desire for the future prospects.

The vision of the company is to become a leading designer who offers the world an invaluable luxury of experienced artwork made possible through the use of handcraft whose main guide is the brand’s soul (Azza Fahmy, 2012).

The company, therefore, has a vision that clearly depicts its origin and its aim to steer ahead along its chosen line. The company highly regards its vision and makes sure it acts in a manner to achieve the vision.

The mission of Azza Fahmy Jewelleries is to deliver its promise of profitability to its partners and to its clients; it endeavors to deliver unique products of handcrafted art.

It aims to achieve this through creativity and innovations. The mission takes care of the interests of the different parties involved in the company. It ensures that the company’s clients remain its chief focus and their interests are vested at the company’s heart.

The objectives of the company are: acquiring a large market share for the company’s unique handcrafted products, venturing into prospective markets, achieving efficiency in management and expanding its online marketing services as well as achieving efficiency in management.

The current strategies that the company is employing in order to achieve its objectives include: change of management style, targeting of the West by focusing on the events occurring in the East and passing of the craftsmanship to the younger generation through apprenticeship.

These strategies aim at achieving efficiency in the running of the company, increasing the company’s market share as well facilitating the company’s future labor force.

External assessment of Azza Fahmy Jewellery

Azza Fahmy Jewellery, having grown bigger from a small business, was founded through Azza Fahmy’s desire for design and eventually transformed it to jewelry collections; the company commands a large market share in Egypt.

The company has gone beyond Egypt and has outlets in the East as well as in the UK where it has business partners. These expansions imply that the business has its fair share of the merits and challenges that come with this expansion as analyzed here.

General Environment

The general environment is majorly composed of those external forces that the company experiences from its external environment. They include; economic forces, social and demographic forces, political, legal and government forces among others. These forces are adequately discussed (Hill & Gareth, 2005).

Economic forces

The lack of stability in Egypt has had mixed effects on the company. It led to significant fluctuations in the value of the Egyptian currency; this made the people to store their fortunes in the form of jewelry and other valuables instead of the depreciating currency.

This increased the market for the jewelry. The challenge, however, is the increasing prices of the raw supplies. The raw resources used are mostly imported and the general inflation in the country has greatly been affecting the turn over (Ghandour, 2000).

The presence of external markets has been a great boost to the company. Most significant is the fact that the Arabic countries have rich people who highly value jewelry and are always willing to spend a fortune on them.

Egypt’s economy is greatly boosted by the tourism industry; the tourists, especially from the West where the company is yet to hit contribute a lot to the market of the products (Hammermesh, 1993).

Social and demographic forces

Statistics indicate that Egypt remains the most populated Arabic country with an estimated population of 80 million people. This large population provides a large market for products made by the company. Although one could argue that the country experiences a huge division in income between the affluent and the less endowed, the middle class constitute the economy and therefore, offer a ready market for jewelry.

The products of Azza Fahmy Jewellery further target different interest groups from the social view point. The products are tailored in such a manner that the wealthy have access to what befits them and so are the youth who want elegance, but less endowed economically (Hammermesh, 1993).

Political, legal and government forces

Political instability that has rocked the country since the ousting of President Hussein Mubarak has had devastating effects on the economy of Egypt. It scared away tourists from the country who constitute a larger share of the country’s GDP.

This in return reduced the economy’s purchasing power. The effect of this was a great reduction in the company’s local and even regional sales. This is so since the political instability witnessed in Egypt were widely spread in the Arabic countries, which account for the largest sales of the company.

The government, having realized that the Egyptian jewelry industry was soon to be a talk of the past due to the mentioned challenges, is coming up with measures to strengthen it.

Through the Ministry of Trade, it aims at coming up with remedies for the problems. It has formed the Jewelry Technology Center, which will facilitate the training of jewelry-makers and designers. These efforts will see the survival of the industry (Hammermesh, 1993).

Environmental forces

The environmental changes taking place around the world are a concern to all aspects of life. The global warming has not spared Egypt and other Arabic countries, which are already arid or semi arid.

The climatic change being witnessed as a result of global warming has devastating effects on economic activities, more so the farming. It is undermining the purchasing power of people and therefore, making the effective demand for the company’s products to go down.

Technological forces

The various advances are more of a double-edged sword to the company; on one hand, the technology, through its social media presents an avenue through which the company can reach out to a large online market. It also enables the company to unveil its products to so many people within a very short time frame.

However, this same technology has opened up fresh competition from new entrants who are offering low quality, but cheap products. Competing with cheap products is not easy given that a number of customers cannot distinguish between original and generic jewelries (Rumelt et al., 2000).

Specific environment

Customers

The company has a strong domestic and foreign customer base for its products. The fusion of culture and modernization through innovation makes it easier for customers, all over, to easily identify the company’s jewelry brand. The affluent members of the society are given an opportunity to order their ostentatious jewelry according to their desired designs.

The tourists, the wealthy Egyptians, the middle class Egyptians and the youth constitute the domestic customers. On the other hand, Standalone and distribution outlets in London, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE serve as the foreign customer bases. The most enchanting aspect of the jewelry offered by the company is their appeal to customers across the age and gender (Azza Fahmy, 2012).

Suppliers

The company is strategically located in the Khan El- Khalili, one of the constituent districts of Cairo. This area accounts for 70% of jewelry produced in Egypt.

This makes it easy for the company to access suppliers since major gold and silver suppliers are based in this district, where the raw materials are most needed by the factories. This ensures that the company does not experience any shortages in supply of the raw materials.

Labor market

Azza Fahmy Jewellery commands a fair share of the labor market. The company is endowed with vast human resource, owing to its culture of passing the skills from the skilled artisans to young people through apprenticeship.

This culture ensures that there is no time when the company will face labor shortage. It also has an advantage given that it trains its own artisans instead of hiring from the external market. This enables the company to spend fairly on human resource as it is less affected by the overrated external market.

Competition

Through offering of the unique brand of luxurious jewelry, the company has curved out its own independent market share. The company’s brands represent the products of value addition through design to the pieces of gold or silver unlike the competitors who attach value to the weight of gold or silver used in making jewelry. This makes the competition from the other jewelry companies less effective (Porter, 1986).

The company has mastered the use of Porters Five Forces Model in edging out competitors. Analysis indicates that Azza Fahmy Jewelry has been able to edge out its direct competitors through product differentiation.

The skills used in the making of this artistic jewelry are massive. When they are combined with huge capital requirement, competitors are eventually kept at bay (Hitt, Duane & Hoskisson, 2012).

SWOT Analysis for Azza Fahmy Jewellery

The company’s major strengths come from its brand differentiation. By offering unique-luxurious jewelry, differentiated from the rest in the market through design, the company attracts a large and classy market for its products.

The initiative to pass the skills to a younger generation is also another strength enjoyed by the company. This avails the much required labor force. Thirdly, the company is under the management of people who have its interest at heart and therefore, always doing what is best to take the company ahead (Marsh, 2008).

The main weaknesses of the company lie in the employees’ poor attitude to change. The business world is dictated by efficiency in management and investment in technology. These are issues that are new to most of the employees at the Azza Fahmy.

The employees were used to the traditional style of working where they enjoyed stronger ties with the owner unlike the current management style. The other weakness comes from the ownership of the company. The company, being a family owned business, has a limited access to capital for expansion.

The economic recession has forced so many investors out of the jewelry business. The company should capitalize on this to increase its domestic and foreign market share. This will give the company more power in the industry.

It has opportunities to expand into the U.S., which research indicates that is a good market for jewelry. This should be done while putting in mind the need to increase the production of jewelry based on different culture other than the Arabic one (Ministry of Investment, 2010).

Recommended strategies for the company

The company needs to focus on reaching out to the youthful generation who constitute the highest population. It is this generation that has the highest affection for jewelry and has a new meaning towards it. The youth are not interested in storing value in jewelry, but rather use it as an expression of swag.

This has already increased the popularity of jewels in the western countries. The company has to target this group by making affordable jewelry, which will not only give the company more popularity, but also attract a high turnover. To achieve this, the company will have to invest in technology through focusing on social media.

Implementation of strategies

The implementation of the suggested strategy will take into consideration two important aspects namely; marketing aspect and the brand. The company has, in the past, concentrated on the production of unique luxurious jewelry brands.

In order to achieve the recommended strategies, the company will have to increase its production of jewelries, targeting the youthful population of the world. This will require more human resource; therefore, the company will have to absorb more of its trainees into the company to facilitate taking care of the surging production (Urban et al., 1986).

The marketing department will aggressively make use of the social media in order to create awareness for the company’s goods. Quality of the sites used in the online marketing of the products will have to be carefully designed so as to reach out to many prospective customers. An investment in business intelligence will be very important so as to make use data analytics, for instance, to make the right decisions as pertains the social sites.

The finance department of the company should embark on acquiring the additional resources that will be required in implementation of these strategies.

The company’s books of account speak volumes and financial institutions will be willing to offer their hand where it is needed (Hammermesh, 1993). This will enable the company to implement the new strategy without facing financial constraints.

Recommended specific annual objectives and policies

The company should be in a position to roll out the proposed strategies at beginning of the coming financial year. This will facilitate the company to meet its next annual objective, which is to increase its revenue by 30% and increase the market share by 100%.

This will be achieved without compromising the worth of goods offered to the customers. The company’s relationship with partners should also be reinforced (Scott, 2000).

Procedures for strategy review and evaluation

The review and evaluation of the formulated strategy will be based on the following traits; consistency, consonance, advantage and feasibility. In regard to consistency, the strategy will be expected not to create mutually inconsistent policies and goals.

For consonance, the strategy will be required to be adaptive to the various changes that will occur in the external environment as well as internal ones. Hammermesh (1993) explains that a good strategy does not overtax an organization’s resources; it efficiently uses the resources in order to achieve the objectives.

Conclusion

Azza Fahmy Jewelry has been experiencing significant growth over the past decade. It has beaten the economic recession and remains focused on expanding to markets and products. Diversification and expansion will facilitate increase of the customer base, and hence be able to compete at the international level.

References

Azza Fahmy. (2011). Company Vision, Mission and Objectives. Web.

Fam, M. (2007). Mideast jewelers look westward. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119880365971054359

Ghandour, M. (2000). Azza Fahmy: Love Made Possible. Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Web.

Hammermesh, G. (1993). Making Strategy Work: How Managers Produces Results. New York, NY: John Wiley.

Hill, W.L. & Gareth, R.J. (2005). Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach.Connecticut: Cengage Learning.

Hitt, A.M., Duane, R. & Hoskisson, E.R. (2012). Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases: Competitivenes and Globalization. Connecticut: Cengage Learning.

Marsh, V. (2008). Egypt’s First Lady of Jewelry.CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/

Ministry of Investment. (2010). Egyptian Women Enterprises. Web.

Porter, M.E. (1986). Competitive Advantage. New York, NY: The Free Press.

Rumelt, R.P., Abbas, A., & Abdulrahman, A. (2011). Strategic Management: Concept and Cases.Arab World Edition. New Jersey: Pearson.

Scott, P.R. (2000). Procedures for Strategy Review and Evaluation. New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs.

Urban, G.L.,Carter, R., Gaskin, S. & Mucha, Z. (1986). Market Share Rewards to Pioneering Brands. Management Science, 6(1): 645-659.