The company that I focused on is Medtronic, Inc., a medical technology company. This company specializes in manufacturing, development, and marketing of medical devices as well as services and therapies for use in treating chronic ailments like spinal conditions, heart diseases, diabetes, vascular diseases, and so forth. The three strategic priorities for this company are globalization, therapy innovation, and economic value creation. SWOT is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Medtronic Inc. uses SWOT analysis to create an overview of its strategic situation. It is SWOT analysis is as follows:
Strengths: The strengths of Medtronic include innovation, employee retention and satisfaction, global growth, and brand name recognition. They describe the positive attributes of the company.
Weaknesses: The weaknesses of Medtronic include a lot of government investigations and over-reliance (more than 50%) on the United States markets. These are areas that need to be improved if the company is to compete with its competitors.
Opportunities: Opportunities for Medtronic include access to care as it champions the largest access to healthcare worldwide. Another opportunity is product quality. It needs to ensure that their products conform to the highest safety standards. Other opportunities include ethics in marketing and sales, product stewardship, and responsible sourcing.
Threats: These are factors beyond the control of the company. Some raw materials and components can only be obtained from one supplier, and this poses a threat to Medtronic if the supply is interrupted with. Another threat that Medtronic faces is that if it fails to comply with the relevant legislation or meet the quality standards, its reputation could be damaged. A damaged reputation would mean loss of customers and revenues.