Sara Lee Case Study Assignment

Sara Lee Case Study Assignment

1. What is Sara Lee’s corporate strategy? How has its retrenchment strategy changed the nature of its business lineup?

The original corporate strategy was acquiring businesses and adding to the corporate bottom line. The corporate strategy changed from acquiring businesses to divesting from non-core lower producing businesses and creating a more focused company along its product lines of food, beverages and household products.

How has its retrenchment strategy changed the nature of its business lineup?

The company has changed from a huge conglomerate to a business narrowly focused on a few product lines, specifically foods. Sara Lee’s planned and executed an exit of businesses they deemed to be nonstrategic.

2. What is your assessment of the long-term attractiveness of the industries represented in Sara Lee Corp.’s business portfolio?

Each industry that Sara Lee executives chose to remain within their portfolio of products is consistently a top producer with several brands that are number one in their category and others that have significant increasing revenues so the long term outlook is better with the remaining businesses.

3. What is your assessment of the competitive strength of Sara Lee Corp.’s different business units?

The competitive strengths will be in the narrow focus on food products and not trying to run a business with many different units in several industries. With the narrow focus of food products Sara Lee can look for opportunities to reduce cost and improve margins along the primary and secondary activities of the value chain.

4. What does a 9-cell industry attractiveness/business strength matrix displaying Sara Lee’s business units look like?

5. Does Sara Lee’s portfolio exhibit good strategic fit? What value-chain match-ups do you see? What opportunities for skills transfer, cost sharing, or brand sharing do you see?

Yes, the retrenchment strategy has allowed Sara Lee to return to its core expertise,...