ABSTRACT
Competitor analysis warrants a chapter of its own for two reasons. First, it is important. Buy a company and you are buying its future earnings. Its future earnings depend on it playing to its strengths and exploiting competitor's weaknesses. Second, companies are notoriously bad at looking outside. A good piece of competitor assessment can add enormous value to a CDD exercise. CDD thinks as carefully about competitor's ability to compete as it does about the targets. For competitor analysis there is a step beyond key purchase criteria (KPC), and that is how they are translated into critical success factors (CSFs). Companies in the same industry often have different CSFs reflecting their different strategies. However, companies sharing similar strategies can share common CSFs. The CSFs for a segment will be linked to the KPCs for that segment. The objective of competitor analysis is to gauge the target's value based on its strategic position vis-a-vis existing and future competition.
