Sustainable competitive advantage

M.COPA is a pay as you go solar energy reflected foundation that had been introduced in the year 2018 by Nick Hughes, Jesse moors, and Chad Larson. The company had been launched in Kenya in the year 2012 and showed its emphasis on producing specific affordable and reliable off-grid energy processes in this regard. The company is also expecting to mitigate the energy issues of six million off-grid homes in Kenya. By that time, they are also looking to expand its operations in countries like Tanzania and Uganda as well. The company’s primary approach is to make the energy affordable to the poor households of Kenya and Tanzania as well as try to reduce the solar capital costs over time. M.COPA has attempted to initiate an online payment process that can be done through mobile and machine – to – machine payment process as well.

Hence the significant criteria that the company had initially liked to implement are as follows-

Since the low-income households had no such access to the increased energy price, therefore the company had tried to provide solar energy at a highly affordable price. Thus initially, the company hinted at a rapid growth in the overall business with hundreds of systems added per day basis and thus increasing the total business turnover to almost 70 million by the end of the year 2018.

Moreover, it is also seen that in a country like  Africa where there is less than 16 percent of the total world’s population, hence in most of the cases, people do not get affordable access to the energy system. Thus more than 20 billion households in the African continent went for grid energy due to its poor quality and the harmful effects of dirty fuel energy on the children as a whole. On the other hand, for lighting purposes, they used to take kerosene or paraffin lanterns. , in this due to specific improper supply chain management techniques, it is seen that in the urban area, the overall fuel cost has been increased to 35 percent that was almost unaffordable to the poor houses of Africa, hence the process had tried to hit over the disposable income of the households. Therefore the challenges for M.COPA were to provide sufficient energy services tom every house of Africa at a specific affordable price. Thus to some extent, the company had been able to meet the overall requirement of all the homes at affordable prices. The photovoltaic solar panels and LED lights have led to decreasing in the total cost to 70 percent. Hence most of the low-income families have eventually tried to evaluate the overall process of availing this type of energy at a suitable price.

Therefore the procedure is considered to be a plug and play solar powered system that had initially offered as the most cost-effective energy solutions as compared to other alternatives. The retail price of the product was $180 that can be priced along with an installation charge of $0.50. Thus this technology that has been embedded with mobile technology can be similar to pay for the overall airtime. The customers can effectively use the top-up process (Tarnanidis et al.2019).

Competitive advantage

Since the overall potential solar power energy had played a massive role in countries like Africa, hence the entry barriers have been remained as more competitive. The company had faced enormous competition from the existing market players over time. It is seen that currently, the demand for mobile solar energy systems had been increasing a lot, and the current market players are looking to make productive items to meet up with this cost. For example, a company named orange had initially started its service in different countries across Africa, which is quite similar to M.COPA. The company had gradually increased its overall customer base and paid the amount with orange money. Thus they have considered themselves as the wholesaler to this process. Apart from this aspect, Pay to go is another part that plays the same element, and it has been co-branded through Unilever companies’ potential distribution process as a whole. Hence the most critical part of M.COPA is to deliver the services in reduced costs to generate an absolute competitive advantage. It can be said that the setup fee of the grid and its installation charge of $0.50 has been quite less compared to other companies. Hence the company has gained an overall competitive advantage in this regard (Purwanti 2020).

M.COPA brand has significantly diversified its operational wings into countries like Tanzania as well as most of the urban parts of Europe and Africa. While the other companies have not been that much able to increase the overall business viability in this regard (Chen and Rey 2019).

Hence it can be said that the company had tried to focus on the below aspects to get its competitive advantage-

Low price

M.COPA Company had effectively initiated the cost leadership strategy to gain a specific competitive advantage. Here the company had focused over generating the same quality product but with fewer prices. Thus in this way, it can be helpful for the company to make the right quality products than its competitors in the perfection of its total production methods. Therefore all these aspects can eventually provide more useful resources (Ding et al.2019).

 Products with different attributes

M.COPA Company has effectively implied its differentiation strategy in solar power energy services. Hence there are undoubtedly other factors that can be highly useful to make the products more marketable to the households. Therefore changes in marketing attributes can also be highly effective in this regard (Attaran and Attaran 2019).

 Defensive strategies implementation

The company can also sometimes try to implement certain defensive to pull them out of the competition. The process if the overall business process will widely imply cost leadership and differentiating strategy in order to try to keep implementing the global competitiveness on which the effectiveness can be achieved in this regard (Good and Calantone 2019).

 Strategic resources

Specific strategic alliances implemented by the company effectively can also increase its overall strategic partnerships in this regard. The company can also try to impose joint ventures in this regard to gain certain competitive advantages (Đurić 2019).

References

Attaran, M., and Attaran, S., 2019. Opportunities and challenges of implementing predictive analytics for competitive advantage. In Applying Business Intelligence Initiatives in Healthcare and Organizational Settings (pp. 64-90). IGI Global.

Bustinza, O.F., Gomes, E., Vendrell‐Herrero, F., and Baines, T., 2019. Product–service innovation and performance: the role of collaborative partnerships and R&D intensity. R&D Management, 49(1), pp.33-45.

Chen, Z., and Rey, P., 2019. Competitive cross‐subsidization. The RAND Journal of Economics, 50(3), pp.645-665.

Ding, H., Fu, Y., Zheng, L., and Yan, Z., 2019. Determinants of the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains: Evidence from the Chinese dairy industry. International Journal of Production Economics, 209, pp.360-373.

Đurić, S., 2019. The attitudes and experiences of the Internet and social media users in Serbia. Journal of Process Management. New Technologies, 7(3), pp.49-57.

Good, V. and Calantone, R.J., 2019. When to outsource the sales force for new products. Industrial Marketing Management, 82, pp.106-116.

Purwanti, I., 2020. GREEN MARKETING AS MARKETER’S DNA IN ERA MARKETING 4.0. Manajemen Bisnis, 9(2).

Tarnanidis, T., Papathanasiou, J., and Subeniotis, D., 2019. How Far the TBL Concept of Sustainable Entrepreneurship Extends Beyond the Various Sustainability Regulations: Can Greek Food Manufacturing Enterprises Sustain Their Hybrid Nature Over Time?. Journal of Business Ethics, 154(3), pp.829-846.