Strategic Decision Taken on Link3 Technologies Limited

NORTH SOUTH UNIVERSITY

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Assignment on

 Strategic decision taken on Link3 Technologies Limited

Course Name: Strategic Management

Course Code: MGT489
Sec: 04

Submitted To

Dr. M. Shahedul Alam

Assistant Professor

Department of Management

School of Business and Economics

Submitted By

Contents

Company overview of Link3 Technologies Ltd        1

Products that are offered by Link3 Technologies Ltd        1

Situation Analysis        2

Decisions taken to overcome the problem        3

Recommendation        5

References        5

Appendix        5

Company overview of Link3 Technologies Ltd

Link3 Technologies Ltd. is one of the leading internet service provider of Bangladesh, which commenced its journey in the year 2000, with a vision to be the largest broadband user based ICT solutions service provider in Bangladesh. The company was previously operating its operation in major cities like Chittagong, Sylhet, Dhaka and currently expanded to other district level area of Bangladesh. To facilitate the huge operations of broadband internet services it has channels in both fiber optic and Microwave backbone covering all the major city area (Link3 technology ltd,.2017). In addition, the company is also using bandwidth categorized as “E1” between Dhaka to Chittagong and Dhaka to Sylhet. Currently, the company is carrying 40% market share. To get more competitive advantages in the portfolio of product offerings Link3 has got some important licenses.

Products that are offered by Link3 Technologies Ltd

Link3 focuses both low cost and differentiation strategy. Low cost strategy is used for designing large data package service for the corporate sectors and the differentiation strategy is used for designing data usage plans for the individual internet service users.

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• Fiber Optical based broadband and wireless based internet services: Price and allocation of the services are charged to customer based on their preferences of usage and the speed of the specific bandwidth. In the retail stage, it offers from 1.5Mbps to 8Mbps speed for the general users. For corporate users the bandwidth allocation starts from the speed of 10Mbps and above with a flat price. Banks, educational institutions, firms, and local outsourcing wholesalers are the main corporate customers.

Major Competitive Advantage

•  24/7 continuous high speed internet service
• Internal high speed file server consisting large storage of movies, games, apps, etc.

To make important decisions Link3’s top level management maintain a diversified advisory committee consisting of six functional level managers with one representative from finance & accounts, sales reporting, and R&D department. We interviewed with A.K.M Shahnewaj, who is working as Executive (IP telephony, Sales and Marketing) in link3 since 2011 and was involved in a decision making process in 2014 as sales reporting representative with other 9 executives.

Situation Analysis

Although link3 did business well, at the years of 2012-2014 management committee found that their revenue as well as profit is not increasing as per their customer increases. To determine the actual problem, management team had a meeting with the advisory board. After a brief analysis, they found following problems:

• During that time, all connections including retail and corporate clients were provided postpaid connection where employees with the help of internal software manually operated billing process by posting payment details and maintaining billing cycle. Retail clients often due their payment and requested for forwarding the bill to the next month, and some other did not paid current month’s bill in request to pay two months total at the end of the second month. Some clients paid half of their actual bill of the current month and kept half due. Later on, those due bills were hard to recovery and these practices also emerged among corporate clients, where for due billing recovery additional customer support, setup time and cost raised rapidly. There were certain risk associated with recovering due payments as “long term relationship” suffered due to excessive payment request. According to the analysis, in total 17-core taka (approximate) remained unpaid and due.
• Another internal cost raised due to offering excessive sales commission. For example, If a sales manager’s basic salary was 11,000 TK for sales commission some employees tend to get 25000 TK and above where all their clients were not sustainable in a long run, which results to loose large portion of the profit for company.
• Many clients found it hard to go Link3 branches or other listed banks for bill pay.
• Determining external factor: Technological flexibility had to raise for bill payment as new mobile banking payment system emerging.
• Determining internal factor: Billing issues should be flexible & quick.

Decisions taken to overcome the problem

For overcoming the problems management took reactive decision, where top level management decided to install specialized software, which can handled large number of billing processing and data tracking, which were previously managed manually. In 2014, Link3 purchased software named Magna Quest (MQ) from Hyderabad, India, Which tremendously improved the situation. The software was managed and maintained to revise the “Building blocks” of competitive advantage in following ways: