A critical analysis of competitive strategies adopted by industries to mitigate the effects of recession 2008-2010 Study on retail industry of Ireland
Authors
Syeda, Zehra Fatima
Issue Date
2020
Degree
MBA in Cloud Computing
Publisher
Dublin Business School
Rights holder
Rights
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Abstract
The current study explicitly focuses in analysing the context of the economic downturn as a result of the Great Recession that substantially affected the Irish economy. Besides, the study further narrows down its scope to assess the extent of recession on the Irish economy. Additionally, in order to analyse the extent of economic downturn the current study has been fragmented into varied sections dealing with a specific purpose. The first section of the study explicitly focuses in providing a detailed outline about the causes and consequences of economic downturn in the Eurozone. Moreover, with the empirical analysis it was conferred that the retail sector of Ireland drastically suffered when the economy entered a severe recession in 2008 and gradually it turned into an economic depression in 2009. In most of the cases, large scale firms respond to the problem by a fast switch to online selling, price competitiveness as they have the scope of making profit from other markets. The following study comprises a description of the circumstances in relation to the entire industry, where SMEs are still struggling with the devastating repercussion of the economic downturn that severely hit the Irish retail industry. Moreover, the Research Methodology chapter lays a coherent discussion on the research philosophy, which confines to a set of assumption that guides the data collection process in order to get to pragmatic conclusions. Besides, excessive reliance in the selection of an Interpretivist philosophy, Abductive approach and Descriptive design would not only assist in answering the structured research question but also helps in satisfying the actionable aims and objectives thus, getting to rational outcomes. However, in order to collect primary qualitative data, the researcher has followed a sequential approach of accumulating raw data from the designated sample size based on a detailed questionnaire consisting of varied section each dealing with critically accessing the impact of economic downturn from both the employers as well as employee perspective within the Irish SME retail industry. The sections help in effectively gauging the responses gathered from the samples in due course of the face-to-face interviews. Based on the inferences gathered it was revealed that the retail industry contributes a sizeable amount to the overall GDP of the nation. Besides, it can also be asserted from the gathered inferences that transcending to online platforms and abiding by the postulates are the two emergent trends in order to avoid the malignant aftermath of the economic downturn. It can be concluded from the above analysis that the economic downturn in 2008-2010 has dramatic impact on the retail industry as a result, deteriorating sales and profit volumes, accompanied by a significant fall in employment levels that lasted for more than two financial years. Besides, one of the immediate repercussions of such an economic fallout was a severe shortage of cash within the industry, as a consequence nearly more than half of the retail outlets went obsolete besides, large retailers already stopped their services in Ireland as a result of consecutive losses. Moreover, the incessant liquidity gap has a detrimental impact of the purchasing parity of potential customer segments which affected the extent of revenue making. Therefore, in the latter sections of study a set of stringent measures has been recommended in order to avoid the recurrence of such economic irregularities in the due course of time. The recommend plans or strategies specifically confines to the effective allocation of financial resources.