A Quest for Global Leadership: A Case Study of Tokyo Electron Group

In the regimes of turbulent business environment sustainability of the competitive advantage highly depends on the ability of a company to respond to macro-environmental changes, thus it very vivid reminds of the quest with the main prize called the global leadership.
This paper is a case study of Japanese Company Tokyo Electron, which has being at the market of semiconductor production equipment for nearly half of a century and made its way from a trading company to one of the world leading manufacturers.
In a response to the global change worldwide, TEL’s top-management developed a new strategy Global Position One, with the main objective to achieve position number one globally. By addressing today’s business environment issues, paying a fair attention to corporate social responsibility and reducing the negative environment of its operations, TEL has created new business opportunities, enlarged its product line and successfully entered new areas. Being an industry innovator and possessing an outstanding R&D abilities, Tokyo Electron keeps the right pace of new technologies delivery.
This paper evaluates how the macro-environmental changes has shaped Tokyo Electron’s strategy, examines it’s dynamic capabilities, estimates strengths and weaknesses of TEL and opportunities and threats which might be harmful to achieve its major objectives. Based on the results of the research we make a forecast whether a quest for global leadership is successful for TEL and identify the issues to be addressed.