Eberhardt Maxime
Business strategy: IKEA invades America

IKEA Environment: * Porter analysis of the Furniture suppliers’ American Market:
CUTOMERS: Basically every American. IKEA’s target is the American, who doesn’t want to spend a lot of money in its furniture supplies, but who wants style and design as well. In IKEA’s vision, the typical customer is a traveler, who enjoys drinking wine, risk and good life. The target of IKEA is really broad, which is positive for the company.
SUPPLIERS: In order to reach the lowest price, IKEA uses its global strength and create a competition with worldwide suppliers. They don’t care if different parts of the same final product are made in different countries. The goal is to have the lowest price at the end. So the suppliers are a lot and IKEA has a lot of power on them, which is positive for the company.
COMPETITORS: The competitors are varied. It goes from the local supplier to big suppliers such as Wal-Mart. The main difference is that there are not low priced furniture retailers in the US. IKEA are quite alone on that market, but some of the competitors has a really big network and can attract easily the customer. The competition is for IKEA the biggest problem on the market.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY: As the CEO of IKEA said, it is very hard to copy the whole world of IKEA. You can try to compete with IKEA on the prices, or on the Brand name (with huge stores, etc.) but you cannot create everything of IKEA. So the barriers to entry are very high in this market, which is good for IKEA.
SUBSTITUTES: I don’t think that there are a lot of substitutes of furniture. You can use a table as a desk but you can buy this table at IKEA too. So this point is very good for IKEA.

To conclude, we can say that the market environment for the company is very good because there are a lot of barriers for a company to really compete with IKEA. The main task for the company is to broad its target and to try to eliminate the competitors.