Question 1 (a) Appraise the application of business strategy using Porters Generic Strategies Framework by identifying the generic strategy of PowerC. Explain your answers with case facts. (11 marks)

Power C is one of the leading manufacturing companies that specialises in organic, gluten-free and calcium fortified cacao powder. The company prides itself in selling cacao powder to individuals who are particularly health-conscious and are allergic to gluten. The price of PowerC cacao is more expensive than most of its competitors' (for example, GreatBody, VivaNaturals, Naturals, HealthOne, ZoomB and APlus) who also manufacture similar types of cacao powder. PowerC has subsidiaries located globally, with its headquarters in Britain. To maximise value creation and minimise costs, PowerC value chain activities are distributed to different parts of the world. Similar as most of its competitors, PowerC (a) grows its own cacao seeds that are non-GMO and pesticide-free; (b) obtains its other raw materials (for example, packaging) from a wide-range of suppliers. Given its relatively high costs in manufacturing cacao powder, Power C would like to drive down its costs and enhance its efficiency through automating and redesigning a large part of its work processes, while retiring current systems that are incompatible with its redesigned work processes. The management plans to embed more ITs (for example, enterprise systems) in its work processes. Moving forward, the management plans to rely on vendors to take charge of most of its computing resources such as services (for example, operating systems) that can run its applications. PowerC management would like to rely on the vendors for storage of data and maintenance of servers. Given that PowerC management believes in contributing to a sustainable environment, PowerC management prefers vendors who aim to be carbon-free. However, PowerC management members have not reached a consensus as to who should program its customised applications for automation of its manufacturing processes. A few of its management members would like the applications to be coded and maintained by its own in-house developers. However, other PowerC management members prefer the applications to be developed and maintained by programmers from India. Given the recent spate of cyberattacks faced by cloud providers worldwide, PowerC management is concerned that the vendor servers which will contain some PowerC data and applications to be breached too. The IT department of PowerC would like its vendors to guard against any security breaches, focusing on strong user authentication, data encryption, and active intrusion detection. As most of the work processes will be redesigned, employees' roles and responsibilities will be affected. Many of the employees will be involved in the gathering user requirement phase in the software stage beyond fulfilling their current roles. As a result, it is expected that many employees will need to work overtime. PowerC management believes in compensating their employees with both monetary and nonmonetary rewards. While the large sum of monetary rewards will reduce its company revenue, the management believes that the monetary rewards will motivate its employees to work harder for the company and thus, enable the company to achieve performance