Sara Lee’s

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1. What is Sara Lee’s corporate strategy? How has its retrenchment strategy changed the nature of its business lineup? At the beginning the company corporate strategy was implementing acquisition strategies to expanding the company’s geographic coverage and into new business categories. The company started as a small wholesale distributor of sugar, coffee, and tea, then it acquire a food processing, packaging, and distribution, and then retail food business. For over 40 years the company had acquired a series of related and unrelated business. Over this course of time, management struggled to manage the company’s broadly diversified and geographically scattered operations. With the retrenchment strategy, Sara Lee Corporation is able to transform it into a more tightly focused food, beverage, and household products company. Management believed concentrating its financial and managerial resources on a smaller number of business segments in which market prospects were promising and Sara Lee’s brands were well positioned would help the company save cost and more profitable. The company had also implement an outsourcing strategy known as Project Accelerate. It a company-wide cost saving and productivity that focused on outsourcing, supply chain efficiencies, and overhead reduction. 2. Prepare a 9-cell industry attractiveness/business strength matrix assessing Sara Lee’s business units (attach file containing your table/matrix). What is your assessment of the long-term attractiveness of the industries represented in Sara Lee’s business portfolio? Please see attachment for the 9-cell industry attractiveness/business strength matrix. • Packaged meat industry - $9.6 billion North American packaged-meat industry. Sales of Meats in North America improved by 5% • Fresh bakery business – sales increase $91m in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2008. 8.3% market share

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