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To What Extent Is Growing Through Integration with Other Businesses a Good Way for a Firm to Increase Its Competitiveness?

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To what extent is growing through integration with other businesses a good way for a firm to increase its competitiveness? (40 marks) Growing through integration is concerned with mergers and takeovers of two businesses. There are several ways of integrating; Horizontal, which is where the business is in the same industry and or same stage of production, Backward Vertical, which is where it is the same industry towards a supplier, forward vertical, which is where it is the same industry towards the customer and Diversification, which is where the two businesses are totally opposite. Growing through one of the processes of integration can have a massive boost/effect on the competitiveness of a business as firms are able to buy out or merge with other large firms, in either their market place or another, to make one big firms in the market. The main firm will gain a larger percentage of the market at the two original market shares of the business are joint together. An example of this happening is in the mobile phone industry with the merger of Orange and T-mobile. This merger had brought together two of the UK’s biggest mobile phone networks and as a result gained them a combined 30 million customers, which meant they had overtaken O2 as the market leaders with a 37% market share. Furthermore, because of the two networks merging it provided them with a USP as it allowed customers to be able to receive signal of both networks to help provide a better signal range. The integration of the two businesses therefore helps both orange and T-mobile to provide a better service to its customers which in turn can tempt customers of other phone networks to use them and therefore gain them even more market share. Moreover, the merger has allowed Orange and T-mobile to compete with the main phone networks like O2 on specific

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