1. What is the potential for profit generation across business cycles in India? Provide a specific example from industry of a multinational company who has had financial success or failure in India? What were the key success/failure drivers and how do they relate to the supply chain?

Ford Motor Co. has recently begun making profits for the first time in more than ten years due to its embrace of an initiative called the Emerging Market Operating Model (EMOM).¹ Part of this model is becoming more locally focused when it produces its vehicles for Indian consumers.  It has given more control to the Ford team in India to deviate from the larger Ford model in order to meet the unique market demands of India. Ford was able to reduce its logistics costs by more than 20% by switching to rail transportation and also increased the amount of locally sourced components in its vehicles to 85%.² These significant costs savings allowed Ford to reduce its prices and meet India’s demand of low-priced vehicles. Ford also partnered with an India-based company that produces vehicles and components for all types of vehicles in India.² This partnership offered a lot of benefits beyond the sharing of intellectual property; Ford was able to leverage the company’s knowledge of the supply chain networks in India and share resources within these supply chains. This helped Ford reduce costs and avoid missteps that foreign companies were prone to make in the past.

2. What were the primary reasons General Motors failed in Indonesia? What impact did their supply chain have on their business results? From your learnings in the course, what is the key reason GM failed?

General Motors made several large missteps in India that ultimately led to its exit from the market. One of the largest reasons why GM failed was their inability or unwillingness to allow the management team in India to make decisions that might move away from GM’s global plans, but would allow the India team to meet demand locally.³ India has consistently proved to be a place that requires business adapt to conditions and methods of the country, rather than attempt to bring a preconceived strategy for success.¹ GM also did not have an appropriate strategy based on volume and scale; by going after the mass market, GM may have been better able to leverage warehousing assets such as dealerships.³ Based on a new approach to the market, India could have also leveraged a different transportation network design that better leveraged the unique options in India. India does not have the same quality of roads in smaller cities as its larger capital cities, making it difficult to deliver products to all areas.⁴ Overall, GM appeared not to have an integrated strategy that addressed the unique aspects of the market it had entered. It was also slow to make changes that may have helped save its operations in India.

¹https://hbr.org/2014/12/how-u-s-businesses-can-succeed-in-india-in-2015

²https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ford-motor-india-strategy-focus/ford-goes-local-in-india-aims-for-bigger-slice-of-competitive-market-idUSKCN1NB07P

³https://hbr.org/2017/06/what-u-s-ceos-can-learn-from-gms-india-failure

⁴https://www.inboundlogistics.com/cms/article/southeast-asia-land-of-opportunity-and-challenges/