Profit Zone

[Idara Viengxay]

You've been told how to get there. "Get high market share and the profit will follow." "Get high growth and your profits will expand." As a manager, you were schooled in how the pursuit of market share and growth automatically places you on a direct route to business success.

However, these formerly direct roads have become mazes riddled with traps, wrong turns, and dead ends. Many large companies, after taking the turn toward market share and volume growth, have only hit a profitless wall.

Market share was the grand old metric, the guiding light, the compass of the product-centric age. Companies focused on improving their product and building economies of scale. This product-centric thinking led to the battle cry: "Get more market share and the profit will follow."

In the past decade, some disturbing examples began to subvert the widespread faith in market share as the ultimate goal and guarantor of business success. Consider the experience of IBM, DEC, GM, Ford, United Airlines, US Steel, Kodak, Sears, and Kmart. All achieved leading market share positions: number one or number two in their industries. Yet all these market share leaders saw their profitability begin to erode during the 1980s. Their dominant share positions did not protect them. As profitability began to be detached from market share, shareholders began to suffer. Despite their strong market position, these market share leaders significantly underperformed the S&P 500 from 1985 to 1995.

Several of these companies have recently initiated radical changes in their business design. Their new focus on profit, not just market share, has led to dramatic rebounds in value. As a result, many other traditional market share leaders have been encouraged to reconsider the assumptions on which their business design is built.

There are countless businesses with high market share but low profitability and low shareholder value. The Japanese have a lock on the memory chip market. USAir once dominated air travel in the eastern United States. Philips is a leader in consumer electronics. None of these companies has experienced significant value growth.

Many companies simply hoped that profitability would return. Some managers inside the companies suspected that it would not, but were hesitant to bring that suspicion to the surface and open up a debate. How could they possibly argue against a high market share position?

Other managers, in their private, honest moments, knew that the profit would never come back but were hesitant to confront the issue openly, fearing that the organization's morale would plummet.

Intel was an exception. It was the one company on the above list that confronted the issue head-on. It had high market share in memory chips in 1985, but Intel's managers recognized that its market share was dead, valueless, and profitless. The 1980s game was over; it was time to build the company's next business design.

"Be in high-growth markets." In the old economic order, in the age of market share, volume growth was a guarantor of success. Growth was what we were taught to pursue. It created higher profits for all, including market share laggards, companies with poor business designs, and companies that were poorly managed. A rising tide raised all boats. One manager articulated the classic view: "There are no management problems that volume growth can't solve. Even if we manage poorly, rising revenue helps cover the mistakes we made."

This maxim, too, has been shaken. Industry growth and a company's value (stock price) growth no longer have a one-to-one correlation. Fast-growing industries such as PC manufacturing, consumer electronics, telecommunications, and software have each produced scores of terminally unprofitable companies. By contrast, no-growth or low-growth industries have produced some of the most successful companies in the world. Coca-Cola achieved significant value growth in the low-growth beverage industry, as did General Electric (GE) in a collection of low-growth manufacturing industries, and Swatch in the low-growth watchmaking industry.

The two most valuable ideas in the old economic order, market share and growth, have become the two most dangerous ideas in the new order. To apply these ideas appropriately (and safely), you must understand the rise of no-profit zones in the economy.

Companies used to be able to command a premium price by simply showing up. There were relatively few players in any competitive arena, and customers held little power. Over the past two decades, however, advances in industrial technology, innovation in business design, increases in global competition, and tremendous improvements in information technology have altered the game. In the face of intense competition, companies in many industries have leveraged efficiency gains and competed for market share by lowering price.

Simultaneously, information has become more accessible to customers, allowing them to conveniently shop for the best deals and the best prices. This forces all contenders to match price reductions or lose customers to a lower-priced competitor. It creates no-profit zones. In the old world, the rule was: Every industry makes money, and the market share leaders make the most money. There have always been one or two exceptions, such as agriculture or passenger rail travel, but they were few and far between.

In the past decade, the rule was broken. Today, no-profit zones are everywhere, and they are growing. The map of the economy is covered with more and larger patches of unprofitability. No-profit zones come in various forms. They can be a part of the value chain (e.g., distribution in computing); they can be a customer segment (e.g., the Medicaid segment in healthcare, or the grocery segment in carbonated beverages); they can be an entire industry (e.g., environmental remediation); they can be individual customers (e.g., Wal-Mart or other large, powerful buyers); or they can be entire business models (e.g., hub-and-spoke airlines, or integrated steel mills).

No-profit zones are the black holes of the business universe. In a physical black hole, light waves go in, but never come back out. In an economic black hole, investment dollars go in, but the profit dollars never come back out.

Imagine an industry with ten competitors. By definition, their market shares add up to 100 percent. Read their strategic plans. They all plan to increase market share. Not by a little, but by a lot.

The vigorous pursuit of market share and the rise in customer power have driven profit from many activities and products, and even from entire industries. More and more no-profit zones have been created. Still, many companies continue to pursue a market share and volume growth strategy, trying to get a bigger piece of a pie that is losing all of its value.

And it's not just our management team. It's our competitors' management teams. And it's the periodicals that follow our industry. The market share tables come out and we all follow them as closely as NBA standings.

All too often, the vigorous pursuit of market share is done at the expense of business design innovation. However, market share leadership in a no-profit zone, or high market share with the wrong business design, is more of a curse than a blessing.

It is easy to understand the trap of market share and growth in a no-profit zone. It is more difficult to understand how growth in a thriving industry can be dangerous. Growth is important, but how growth is achieved is much more important.

There are three curses of growth. First, high growth with a bad business design destroys value faster. Witness the value destruction occurring in so many high-tech, high-growth industries today. Growth is attractive, but growth carries high risk, especially when the business design is wrong.

Second, besides being riskier, high growth is much harder to manage. The euphoria of being in a high-growth environment blocks out the reality that growth creates a much higher management challenge.

The third curse of growth arises when a business grows by stretching its business design to serve customers that the business design was not intended to serve. To make up for the mismatch, the company is forced to lower prices or expand its scope into areas where it is not operationally efficient. Both of these actions depress profitability. Once again, the end result is a no-profit zone.

No-profit zones are emerging every day. Activities that were once valuable turn profitless. Value migrates toward activities that are more important to customers--activities where profit is possible.

In the past decade, several business leaders have emerged who have figured out, or intuitively understood, how the rules of the game have changed. Their record of value growth is all the more remarkable when compared to the growth prospects of their industries and the lagging value performance of the market share leaders.

These reinventors think differently; they see things differently; they act differently. They start with the customer and work their way back. They start with the profit question ("Where will I be allowed to make a profit?") and work their way back. They are constantly focused on how the profit zone is shifting. Where is it today? Where will it be tomorrow?

A decade ahead of their peers, the reinventors saw the move from the old product-centric, market share world to the new customer-centric and profit-centric environment. They were not alone; the investment community also understood that the sands were shifting. It downgraded the "old order" market share stocks and reallocated its investment dollars to the "new order" reinventor companies. The old order companies concentrated on market share and yesterday's profit zone. The new order companies reinvented their business design every five years to stay relevant to customers and to move into new profit zones. Several hundred billions of dollars of value shifted from companies that had dominated yesterday's profit zone to those that were finding or creating the profit zones of tomorrow.

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