Staples Inc. SWOT analysis

With almost 2281 retailing stores across the globe presently, Staples Inc. was initially a small store created in 1985. Since then, it has grown tremendously. Headquartered in Massachusetts, US, the company specializes in providing office equipment and machines to different businesses worldwide. It exclusively distributes its manufactured commodities to 26 countries other than US.  It employs more than 90000 people making it one of the largest businesses of US in terms of labor employed. According to a 2010 survey, the Staples Inc had annual revenue of $24.5 billions. The slogan used for staples inc. sales is “that was easy”.

Staples Strengths

Staple is a firmly established and worldwide famous company. This is perhaps the most important strength of Staples. People recognize Staples’ commodities as high quality products and feel free to rely on it. This positive and encouraging response has led to Staples controlling a wide amount of market shares in this industry.

It has a well developed infrastructure. It is situated on preferable and densely populated locations giving it the ‘location benefit’ and has almost 125 established warehouses for the storage of its products.

Also, the wood and raw material it uses for manufacturing products is passed through a thorough quality check. This factor has always led to the satisfaction of customers. The large size and wide recognition of Staples have helped it achieve the economies of scale. Distribution economies, financial economies, risk bearing economies and marketing economies are just the perfect advantages that strengthen its position.

Staples Weaknesses

As earlier discussed, Staples is an employer of above 90000 people from around the world. Therefore the greatest cost it incurs is the payment of employee turnover. This leads to minimizing profits and earnings per share. Also because of this huge expense, a very less amount is left for reinvestment into the company. This factor has restricted its growth over the years.

The other major weakness of Staples is a virtual breakdown or abnormality in distribution chain. This indicates that the supply chain of staples is not as strong as it should be. Therefore because of mid-way losses and improper organization, the potential profits of the company are lost.

Opportunities for Staples’ Inc