First and foremost, Hup Seng was set up in 1957 to serve Malaysian with confectionery products such as biscuits. Hup Seng is founded by four brothers of the Kerk’s family and one partner to start a small scale business which is selling biscuits from one town to another with only using van (Hooi, 2015). However, Hup Seng has further transformed their business by turning into a public listed company in 1991 to strengthen their business position in the confectionery industry. There are three subsidiaries of Hup Seng Industries Berhad engaged in the business of confectioneries which include trading and manufacturing cookies, biscuits and coffee mix (The Wall Street Journal, 2016). Despite the average growing demand of their products, …show more content…
This provides them plenty of strategies in overcoming future crisis (Hooi, 2015). In addition, the continuous improvement in quality management system has accredited them several recognition of award such as MS ISO 9001:2000 Quality System Certification in 2003, MS ISO 22000:2005, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), and even Hala Certification MS 1500:2009/1 145-08/2004 (Hup Seng, 2016). Besides, Hup Seng Industries Berhad is also constantly facing various challenges internationally and nationally. In local, several challenges faced by Hup Seng Industries Berhad include the hiking of power tariff and raw materials which hurt the overall profit. Hence, they look for a potential place to set up manufacturing such as Indonesia in the perspective for expansion as well as reduce the production cost (Musa, 2014). This study aims to analyse the competitiveness of a company based on their existing resources in order to deal with the current challenges as well as tabulating the possible strategy to strengthen the company position in the confectionery …show more content…
The lack of diversification in terms of business in the market can be truly drawback for a Hup Seng as economy crisis from worldwide will result in the immense damage towards the profitability in overall.
2) Research Development is lacking behind in terms of innovation
Besides, the company has lacked behind from the innovation in terms of research and development especially coming out with a new creative product idea. This has given a great challenge in the market segmentation as they couldn’t position themselves in the market. This is true when it comes to the young people segmentation. Young people generally label this company as “old people biscuit”.
Opportunities
1) Tax incentives from government
Despite the weakness mentioned, there are several opportunities that Hup Seng can benefit from it. Firstly, the tax incentives from the Free Trade Agreements (FTA) in terms of exporting are generally lucrative for the exporters (MATRADE, 2016). Malaysia’s government is always encouraging the local firms to expand globally so that the local company can be known in worldwide, in return enhancing the reputation of the