Introduction
Atlantic Land and Improvement Company (Alico Inc.) is one of the largest agricultural companies in the United States of America. It owns Alico Citrus and Alico Water Resources, all of which are some of the best organizations in their respective niches. The organization has existed since the 1800s, which makes it one of America’s oldest existing companies. Alico Citrus produced 7.6 million boxes in the 2020 season (Alico Incorporated, 2022). The company is well situated in different parts of Florida, such as Hendry, Polk, Collier, DeSoto, and Highlands counties. Alico Citrus controlled about 45,000 acres of land by the end of 2019. Moreover, the company revealed that it had an increase of 70% during the 2020 financial year and planted 500,000 trees between 2018 and 2020 (Alico Incorporated, 2022). This information reveals the extent to which Alico Inc., through its subsidiary, Alico Citrus, is addressing the market’s needs.
The existence of the company for several years and its continued progress indicate how it meets and addresses all its challenges and opportunities in the market. It is therefore crucial to understand the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). Kurmanalina et al. (2020) indicate that SWOT analysis mainly explores an organization’s internal and external issues influencing its operations and development. The strengths and weaknesses are considered internal forces, while opportunities and threats are external forces to the business. Understanding these forces can help identify problems affecting the companies and recommend ways to address them for better and continued performance.
Table 1. Alico Inc. SWOT Analysis
Explanation of the SWOT Analysis Matrix Produced
The SWOT analysis matrix above presents some of the core issues for Alico Citrus’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The company has several strengths enabling it to thrive in the market niche it occupies. First, the company offers a high level of satisfaction for its customers in every market it enters. The organization has a special branch that manages customer relationships, thus ensuring that all the customer feedback is incorporated into its production and sales practices. This enables it to meet the needs of its existing clients and make them ambassadors for potential customers due to its good branding. Second, the company has a strong vendor community based on its culture of working with distributors and dealers. The vendors promote the company and train all the sellers to reach their customers more effectively (Alico Incorporated, 2022). Third, its successful record in mergers and acquisitions makes it easy for the organization to work with allies and build more effective supply chains. While these strengths are not good enough to protect the company from protecting its existing market share, they are effective in enabling the business to penetrate new markets.
The company also has several internal weaknesses affecting its operations and strategic development. The weaknesses impact the organization’s success because they make the business not align its operations and strengthen its competitive advantages and positioning. First, the business has not effectively tackled the challenges presented by emerging companies, which has made it lose a portion of its market share. Second, being an old-fashioned company, it is slow to implement new technologies that are crucial in the agricultural sector. Its current investment in mechanization does not coincide with the market it serves and its vision. Third, the company has not succeeded in integrating businesses that have varied work cultures (Alico Incorporated, 2022). This has made it fail in some of its mergers as the smaller companies are unable to adjust to the standards set by Alico Citrus and its parent company.
The company has several opportunities that it can explore to perform better in the business. According to Liu et al. (2019), customers are increasingly spending more on fresh agricultural products, shifting from processed foods. This makes Alico Citrus make advances and capture new customers and retain its existing ones thereby increasing its sales. In addition, more people are buying from stores, which is an opportunity for Alico Citrus to seize and use the tools provided by online platforms to understand its customers by utilizing big data analytics (Himesh et al., 2018). Moreover, the company has several avenues for getting new technologies and revamping its mechanization approaches that are crucial in production and sales. These can help the firm maintain its customers and lure new ones through value-based propositions.
Alico Citrus also faces various issues that it cannot control such as counterfeits and low-quality products. In most cases, such products are sold at a cheaper price, which forces the business to adjust its prices. Even though some suppliers produce low quality, some new entrants are emerging stronger with flexible pricing and strategies. Such players in the market force the company to adjust its operations and prices to effectively compete against such suppliers. Furthermore, Shapiro (2019) notes that companies pay higher margins to effectively compete against local distributes in some markets. These threats make the firm less effective in meeting its target markets in addition to reducing its revenue and profit margins.
Recommendations
The SWOT analysis of Alico Citrus indicates that the company has strengths and opportunities, which make it potentially ready to maintain and expand its market. The strengths present the internal strategies that the organization possesses and that are crucial to its success. On the other hand, the opportunities are the areas that the company has not exhausted, but which when explored, can result in greater benefits. On the contrary, the firm also has some internal and external issues that need improvement for it to succeed in its business. The major areas identified by the analysis include effective customer feedback utilization and increased investment in technology.
Alico Citrus can address its challenges of ineffectively handling new entrants by incorporating the feedback it receives from the customers. The sales team that is in contact with the company’s client should be empowered to provide real-time feedback from the buyers regarding how the competitors are doing and how it can achieve its business’s goal in such a competitive environment. It can also address its inadequacies in the technology by investing more in big data analytics and mechanizations in the fields. The large acres of land owned by the firm requires heavy and modern equipment that can handle more production and processing to meet the market demands. The investment in big data analytics is crucial because of the need to understand customers more and offer them customized pricing to meet their budgets.
Reference List
Alico Incorporated (2022) Web.
Himesh, S., et al. (2018). ‘Digital revolution and Big Data: a new revolution in agriculture’, CABI Reviews, pp. 1-7. Web.
Kurmanalina, A., et al. (2020) ‘A swot analysis of factors influencing the development of agriculture sector and agribusiness entrepreneurship’, Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal, 26(1), pp. 1-8. Web.
Liu, Z., Mutukumira, A. N., and Chen, H. (2019) ‘Food safety governance in China: From supervision to coregulation’, Food Science & Nutrition, 7(12), pp. 4127-4139. Web.
Shapiro, C. (2019) ‘Protecting competition in the American economy: Merger control, tech titans, labor markets’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(3), pp. 69-93. Web.