AT&T Business Strategy

AT & T Wireless is a leading wireless communications provider in the US market. The US wireless market constitutes over 243 M wireless subscribers. This represents 81% market penetration rate. In the wireless market, voice and data mobility (video media, downloaded content, Internet access) is on sale. The wireless market is distributed among differentiated technologies from the following major competitors. AT & T - TDMA, GSM, UMTS / HSPDA Verizon Wireless - CDMA, EV - DO Sprint Nextel CDMA, EV - DO T - Mobile - GSM, UMTS Cingular Wireless acquired traditional AT & T Wireless and SBC Curing, BellSouth and Cingular Wireless Merger, a new AT & T Mobile Business Unit

Beginning with Model T, after the First World War, the centralized command and control business and operational strategy began to dominate. Vertically integrated enterprises use the principle of mass production efficiency that dominated the world of companies until the latter half of the 20th century. Later in the 20th century, thinking about horizontal integration began to become a general trend. Why do not you have "all" manufacturing and production assets? Also do not use the necessary components and processes to create, produce, distribute, sell, and support our products. Furthermore, in order to deliver only the final product to the demand point, please do not use very low manual labor cost in other parts of the world. This collaborative (horizontal) approach starts to dominate, but there are some interesting implications.

As explained in the previous article "Business Transformation of AT & T: Connectivity, Service Experience", communication service providers have adopted one of three integration strategies to protect their competitive position. Horizontal integration or vertical integration. The CenturyLink - Level 3 transaction is not as concerned as AT & T - Time Warner or Verizon - Yahoo / AOL (although not so large), probably due to the traditional vertical integration / integration of players that have been seen in the industry for several years Thing. Companies such as Level 3 and CenturyLink are expanding to the current scale by integrating the functions of the entire value chain vertically.

Adopting a cost competitive strategy means that companies have found some unique business processes or resources that other companies can not get in the market. Business process is the basic unit of the value chain. For example, the series of value creation activities called inbound logistics in Figure 2.6 is actually a collection of different activities that people perform when loading docks and warehouses. These different sets of activities are called business processes. A series of steps or processes necessary to execute each element of the value chain.