Fuji Xerox Strategic Alliance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Fuji Xerox Strategic Alliance - Essay Example However, the 4:1 success ratio of strategic alliances has not deterred companies and business enterprises from continuously forming strategic alliances. The most viable reason for this continuation of forming strategic alliances despite the frequent failures may be the present era's increasingly competitive environment. Business firms and companies in every industry are searching new and more effective ways to increase and sustain their competitive advantage. In this search for new mediums to augment the competitive advantage, most of the companies have realized that, owing to a variety of reasons e.g. cultural and social differences, change in consumer's needs and wants and today's accelerating technological advances, significant improvements in performance and competitive advantage cannot be achieved alone ( Whipple J.M. and Frankel R., 1999). Per se, the traditional response of acquisition to enhance the performance and competitiveness of a company is no longer the only alternative. Strategic alliance is the new alternative that facilitates the merging of partnering companies or firms' individual strengths and expertise while also compensating for the participating companies internal resource scarcities without them having to make the required investments for the actual ownership. The most fundamental aspect for a strategic alliance to be a successful, is finding the right match in which experience, expertise, knowledge and strategic resources of the participating companies will complement each other. However, in the business arena today, the researchers have found out that newly formed strategic alliances are more vulnerable to failure than those which have lasted for some time (Lunnan R and Haugland A.S., n.d1.). According to Steve Steinhilber, the vice-president of Strategic Alliances at Cisco, "companies worldwide launch more than two thousand strategic alliances every year, about the quarter of them are complete failures and more than half never deliver as promised" (Steinhilber S, 2008). However, amidst these strategic alliance failures there is the "Fuji Xerox", the strategic alliance between the Japan's Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd and America's Xerox Corporation, which can be said to be the most successful long term strategic alliance, till date. Hence this paper has been developed as report that envisages the evolution of this strategic alliance between Fuji and Xerox and how it became the most successful strategic alliance as "Fuji Xerox". In the course of understanding the factors that facilitated and made this venture the most triumphant long term strategic alliance, the report perhaps, will also be able to shed some light on the essential building blocks of successful alliances and how to establish them. Creating a