A Archie - A CASE STUDY - RYANAIR: Individual Report on MBA Assignment of Competitive Strategy and Business Performance

A CASE STUDY - RYANAIR, Individual Report on MBA Assignment of Competitive Strategy and Business Performance. Be it your undergraduate or postgraduate degree, you will find this assignment as an invaluable reference, a framework to structure your essay and do well in your studies. (Marks awarded for this assignment is 73%. That is the highest out of over 80 students). From the lecturers note; This assignment was a joy to read. It was written in an intelligent form and was well structured even though I might have structured it a little differently. The main thing was you had ideas; you mostly backed these up either by logic or evidence; and you made those ideas into a cleaver evidence-based story.I think you could have been a little more efficient with your use of words and that would have allowed you to expand on ideas you brushed over or failed to include. For example, we do not need to know who founded Ryanair or when nor do we need to know about the changing ownership structure of Virgin Express as none of these matters are used later.There was some good examples as a result of your literature search. Some of your examples, however, were a little out of date and could have been easily updated by using, for example, data available on the Association of European Airlines web site and the web sites of your chosen organizations. That way, you could have positioned the size of these organizations in the context of the wider industry. I particularly liked your attempt to prepare a value chain analysis of the financial data. Even though I do not agree with your use of the number of aircraft as a driver, you do, at least, explain the difficulty you faced and why you chose that as a driver. My main criticism of this is your failure to acknowledge the work by Shank and Govindarajan that was undertaken in class. As you will see, this was just one example of a wider failure to fully reference.My only other significant criticism relates to the limited financial analysis and leaving issues of load factors and breakeven almost until the end. Some of these could have been used either earlier to support your arguments especially if you considered further the validity of the headline figures. You could also have tried to check, using your own figures, the accuracy of the FT figures quoted on page 23.Despite all these comments, this was a good, solid piece of work. I expect you to use this assignment as a template (not directly copy) and produce even a better piece of work by taking the lecturers comments into consideration and also using the latest financial data available for your chosen business. GOOD LUCK!