Executive summary

In this business report, there is an exhaustive analysis of the Nintendo company. The investigation stems from the urge from the energy ministry that is responsible for scrutiny of companies that shows the interest of extending their branches into our country. The report contains, a particular description of the Nintendo company.

Furthermore, the paper looks closely at the international strategy that this company employs to gain its popularity to a multinational company (Terpstra et al., 2012). Both the marketing and logistic approaches of Nintendo gets singled out. After that, the paper focuses on the human resource management approach that the company deploys. The write-up then conducts an in-depth analysis of the company which births recommendations and conclusions. Lastly, the paper presents appendices that elaborate on the areas that can pose difficulty on the reader who in this case is the industry minister. At the end of this report is a list of references which presents reliable sources where data got sourced.

Company Description

Nintendo is computer software, computer electronics and gaming industry that operates in multiple nations. Its headquarter is Kyoto, Japan. It was initially majoring in the manufacturing of playing cards that are human-made. The company currently concentrates in developing, producing and marketing of video games and products of entertainment. Nintendo was established in September 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi (Firestone2011). The company has unique establishments that crown it to be a multinational company. The company hosts 5166 employees from all over the globe who brings the company’s operations to success. The current research reveals Nintendo’s revenue to exceed 4.4 billion U.S dollars slightly. Nintendo conducts its services on a global scale. Its diversity extends to Australia, Europe, Korea, and North America. It has developed other tributaries in America such as Washington and Redmond. Also, it reaches its boundaries to parts of Canada.

The company gets considered as stable and prosperous based on its ability to produce highly technological games that employ the knowledge of 3-dimensional technologies of gaming, digital images as well as attractive graphics they incorporate into their system. The stability credit of the company stems from its ability to withstand the awkward moments of business and emerging the best by working around the clock to improve and innovate their products hence outshining their dominant competitors such as sonny and Microsoft (Firestone, 2011). Recently, the company has been in the wind whereby most of the media houses, as well as news centers, drew focus towards Nintendo. Among the first headlines include the release of Nintendo Switch new version that was about to be released, the arrival of the new Pokémon on Nintendo Switch, best third quarter that Nintendo posted in eight years due to the incorporation of the switch and so on.

Company’s international strategy

The key strategy that Nintendo Inc. apply is a differentiation strategy whereby the entertainment and gaming products and services they offer are unique and attractive. The acceptability of its products in the overseas market is reportedly high. The innovations of the company are also improving continuously every day hence making competitors unable to imitate the ideas the company uses (Terpstra et al., 2012). It, therefore, stands to have a competitive advantage over other relative companies across the borders. Also, the company has regional formats for its games that differ from one country to another to shun importations of similar games and fit the video formats to respective geographical regions.

Nintendo has an extensive market where it carries its operations from as well as marketing of its gaming products. The countries which Nintendo concentrates include; Bahaman, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Mexico, Indonesia, and many others. Games from America are released to this vast market first followed by games from Canada. Every country accesses games that are exclusive to their target. As the location of this company dictates, it conducts most of the research and development activities in Japan, the United States as well as Mexico and Australia (Terpstra et al., 2012). These countries have intensive industrialization, high technological advancements that aid technical researches and in turn facilitates the development and improvement in product generation. The states have stable economic and political powers that enable the company to run its research activities with limited insecurity distractions. The vast population in these counties also contribute to their choice by Nintendo as a high number of people offers broader primary markets for the company’s products and services.

Nintendo has consistently shown improvements and continuity in offering the incredible gaming and products and services and computer software facilities (Nicholson, 2015). However, the company faces stiff competition that emerges offers similar products or services. Alongside Sony and Microsoft, are Zynga which generates and provides games of social orientation for websites and smartphones (Subramanian et al., 2011). Independent developer known as CCP games is another upcoming competitor. It deals with the development of massively multiplayer online games. Also, there exists Activision Blizzard that primarily develops and publishes video games in America.

From SWOT analysis, the company proves to trade alongside numerous Strengths. Nintendo develops products which orient from up to date innovations. Although other competitive companies produce innovative products, they only seem to pile current changes on the existing ones. The most current innovation that the company has gotten the market of Nintendo to improve beyond its competitors significantly is the introduction of the famous Wii which encourages physical interactions between the games and the system. Research reveals that the company can focus on a single segment of the market (Ficklscherer et al. 2016). Despite the pressure that its competitors pose on it to incorporate other services such as music to its games, Nintendo has remained focused on its main gaming business. In conjunction with Strengths, the company is utilizing numerous opportunities that are not in use by its rivals. The extensive market of female gamers is one of the opportunities that the company has realized. Alternatively, the company is moving away from the strategy of a serious player that is familiar to its competitors to family strategy. The company is moreover reducing the gap that exists in innovative games like brain training by continuously capitalizing on the launching of its DX products as the leading company in the market.

On the other hand, the company is held back by some Weaknesses and Threats it faces. Firstly, the low pricing strategy that Nintendo employs can easily get emulated by its rivals which will lead to customer loses hence low-profit realization by the company. Also, the ability to realize gaps in the market can get implemented by other companies; accordingly Nintendo’s popularity will significantly reduce (Ficklscherer et al. 2016). Nintendo, therefore, seems to focus on both short and long term strategies that ensure it remains a market leader. The company produces innovative products that are of low technological level to outshine its rivals hence by sourcing these products to alternative markets.

Company’s Marketing Approach

Nintendo Inc. disburses its products and services to all parts of the world. Its distribution channels have spread widely to reach its customer basements. The most familiar market providers to the company are; Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Turkey among many other potential markets. The choice of market stems from the ability of these countries to offer strong large demand for the products. Secondly, these countries seem to have stable economies of scale which enables Nintendo to reap more profits than what it can realize from its home market.  (Maruyama & Ohkita, 2011). Political stability also contributes to the choice of these countries as the company can venture into these countries without fears of terrorism.

Furthermore, these countries have different technological advancements that may be valuable to the development of the company’s products and improvements on innovations. In the aim of seeking resources, the production of products in foreign countries may be cheaper in comparison to the home production costs. The accessibility points of Nintendo’s products are; shopping malls, hypermarkets and retail shops for electronics.

Nintendo has put in place competitive marketing strategies that enable it to emerge among the best company. The company brings into play 4ps strategy, i.e. product, price, promotion, and location. To begin with, is the pricing of its products. The company conducts price skimming applies premium pricing of its games. Also, the company takes orders of the new games before it goes ahead to launch them, alongside launching of its products, the company promotes its massive followers with a variety of free gadgets and other visible products that support awareness of the brand in launch (Maruyama & Ohkita, 2011). The company lobbies advertisements and market campaigns through social media, newspapers, televisions among other advertisement platforms to spread roots in their consumer markets. From products, Nintendo produces videogames that are exemplary and interesting to the market such as Donkey Kong. Despite the company’s diversity and accessibility to different counties in the world, the company makes timely and convenient deliveries to its customers.

Nintendo engages to both physical and virtual distribution networks. The virtual avenue is through online interactions with the customers. The company distributes its gadgets and the hardware proportion of its stock through physical means to its marketing centers such as hypermarkets, retail shops and so on (Cavusgil et al., 2014).  The company avails software for users to access online and download the games from a variety of sites such as Amazon and ebay.com. To facilitate the distribution process of its products, Nintendo has a massive network of public relations personnel that publish information about the company and providing the users with relevant updates that emerge from the company. The publication team is also responsible for the publication of the company news.

Company’s Logistic Approach

Japan forms the manufacturing basement for Wii U. on the other hand; China remains to be the final assembly point of many products from the Nintendo company. The assembly takes place from the famous Chinese company Foxconn. The considerations of Nintendo to assemble its products in China based on the need to utilize the china’s cheap labor and maximize on the returns. Also, China’s government regulations are favorable as the payment of taxes is low compared to the tax imposed on manufacturing companies in Japan (Cavusgil et al., 2014). Apart from cheap labor and friendly government regulations, there is a reasonable advancement of technology in the Chinese industries. Therefore, with the consistent innovations that Nintendo venture in, such level of technological advancements are necessary. A large population in China also offers the first market for the products hence need for ready market becomes a building block for the company’s decision to do the manufacturing of its products herein.

Company’s Human Resource Management Approach

Nintendo as any other gaming company employs key and the peripheral workforce. Sources prove that the above 85% of the company’s employees make up the development sector as the rest align themselves in the functional support sector. The company relies heavily on freelancers as their workforce hence ruling out the need for the HR (Maruyama & Ohkita, 2011). The company displays gender biasness as women who secure employment are approximately 6%.  The minor ethnic groups manage to acquire around 3% of the chances available in this company. Therefore, allowing the company to encroach into our country will be much beneficial as the youths will secure employment and reduce poverty levels in the country. Furthermore, it is clear that the major ethnic groups will benefit more than the minority tribes as the company’s employment criterion is bound to the population a specific tribe holds. Men will also help significantly in comparison to ladies.

Analysis

Offering a chance to Nintendo to extend its roots and provide its services to our country is subject to the risks as well as benefits it fosters to the state. Our nation being a developing country, the emerging gaming companies are likely to get suppressed due to the innovative and technologically advanced products and services that Nintendo offers (Nicholson et al.,2015). Also, it will promote tribalism in the country as most of the employees will get sourced from a dominant tribe in the state. Contrary to the risks the company gets associated with numerous benefits to the country. Arguably, the country’s GDP will rise due to the heavy taxes that this company is likely to pay to the government. Also, the firm will provide massive employment opportunities to the jobless citizens of our beloved country; hence the state’s economic phase will improve. Besides, Nintendo will uplift the country’s level of technology as it will educate its employees on the current techniques necessary for the production of gaming products (Terpstra et al., 2012). The education system of the country is likely to develop through gaming and game designs, and the students will develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills as well as sharpening the students’ IQ. Video games also provide avenues and opportunities for the elderly to advise youths hence brings moral uprightness.

Recommendations and conclusions

From the analysis above, it is clear that the decision to allow Nintendo to conduct business into our country is of significant impact to the economy of the country (Nicholson et al.,2015). The company ministry of industries under the management of the minister should beyond reasonable doubts legalize Nintendo’s business administration into the country. However, the company should revise its employment criterion to curb unemployment herein wholesomely. The company further get focus on its supply and chain management to harness success that correlates with the ability of the company to disburse its products to the market in time. The company should also consider integrating higher cooperation levels in its business.

Presentation and Appendices

The appendices provide the summary of the report to ease the understanding of the statement by the minister given he is a busy person who manages more great ministry of industry.

Appendix 1: SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Appendix 2: GDP – Gross Domestic Product = government investments + Expenditures from the government + gross investment + Private expenditures –Imports + Exports.

Appendix 3: IQ-   Intelligence Quotient or measure of one’s intelligence. Its representation is in %.

Appendix 4: DX– leveraging the current technology to rework the products, processes as well as strategies under use.

References

Firestone, M. (2011). Nintendo: Company and Its Founders: Company and Its Founders. ABDO.

Nicholson, V. P., McKean, M., Lowe, J., Fawcett, C., & Burkett, B. (2015). Six weeks of unsupervised Nintendo Wii Fit gaming is effective at improving balance in independent older adults. Journal of aging and physical activity, 23(1), 153-158.

Sutherland, A. (2012). The story of Nintendo. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

Sparks, B. A., Denhez, N., Yoo, Y., Kim, A., Song, Y. D., Jones, G. G., & Ledbetter, C. J. (2017). U.S. Patent Application No. 29/564,522.

Terpstra, V., Foley, J., & Sarathy, R. (2012). International marketing. Naper Press.

Maruyama, M., & Ohkita, K. (2011). Platform strategy of video game software in Japan, 1984–1994: theory and evidence. Managerial and Decision Economics, 32(2), 105-118.

Subramanian, A. M., Chai, K. H., & Mu, S. (2011). Capability reconfiguration of incumbent firms: Nintendo in the video game industry. Technovation, 31(5-6), 228-239.

Cavusgil, S. T., Knight, G., Riesenberger, J. R., Rammal, H. G., & Rose, E. L. (2014). International business. Pearson Australia.

Ficklscherer, A., Stapf, J., Meissner, K. M., Niethammer, T., Lahner, M., Wagenhäuser, M., … & Pietschmann, M. F. (2016). Testing the feasibility and safety of the Nintendo Wii gaming console in orthopedic rehabilitation: a pilot randomized controlled study. Archives of medical science: AMS, 12(6), 1273.