August 2, 2005

Distinguishing between a commodity business and franchise

One of the analysis i have been doing for some time is to analyse various industries like cement, steel, media, gas , FMCG etc and try to asess their competitive scenario. The reason for doing this analysis is to gain a better understanding of these industries, compare them with each other and also to develop some kind of models / categorisations.

One of the frustations i have felt , is the lack of litreature on the various types of business models. The typical one that get discussed are the ideal franchise like business models like coke ( at global level ) or nestle, asian paints, HLL etc at an indian level. The other extreme are the absolute commodity type businesses like airlines, steel ( i agree that within these commodity type business there are some value creating companies).

But there are businesses out there, which lie between the two extremes. For example auto components, power , banks, branded textiles etc. I am trying to analyse these various industries on porter's five factor model and other variables so that i can conceptually think about a business and assign it to a model (not the best approach, but makes it easier to analyse a company and gives a starting point

While i was doing this, yesterday, i came across one such exercise being done ( http://pink-sheets.blogspot.com/ <http://pink-sheets.blogspot.com/> ). Should be helpful to me in my exercise

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