Porter’s Five Forces and IBISWorld industry reports

Are you looking for a quick and effective way of working out the potential profitability of a company depending on which industry it is trying to break in to?

Well you’re in luck as our popular database IBISWorld has a fantastic reporting function that allows for you to combine Porter’s Five Forces with its already powerful industry reports.

Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for industry analysis and business strategy development that was developed by Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School in 1979. It draws inspiration from industrial organisation economics to offer five forces that demonstrate the competitive intensity of an industry resulting in a better understanding of the potential profitability of a particular market.

Porter found that 19% of a company’s profitability is determined simply by which industry it operates in.

For each force, IBISWorld breaks the various elements down into helpful bitesize chunks which allows for a combination of quick skim reads of what is going on in a particular industry, as well as offering more complex level information to get a really deep understanding of the situation.

1. Threat of new entrants

This force is broken down into the following sections:

• Competitive landscape – barriers to entry
• Competitive landscape – cost structure benchmarks
• Operating conditions – capital and labour intensity
• Operating conditions – industry assistance
• Operating conditions – regulation and deregulation
• Operating conditions – technology and systems

2. Buying power of customers

This force is broken down into the following sections:

• Products and markets – major markets
• Products and markets – demand determinants
• Competitive landscape – basis of competition

3. Supplier power

This force is broken down into the following sections:

• Products and markets – supply chain
• Major companies
• Competitive landscape – cost structure benchmarks

4. Threat of substitutes

This force is broken down into the following sections:

• Competitive landscape – basis of competition
• Definition – similar industries

5. Industry competitors

This force is broken down into the following sections:

• Major companies
• Competitive landscape – basis of competition
• Competitive landscape – barriers to entry
• Competitive landscape – capital and labour intensity
• Competitive landscape – market share concentration
• Life cycle
• Industry outlook

So check out IBISWorld today and search for industry and market reports that cover UK, US, China, Australia and Global sectors. Reports can be downloaded as PDFs and are visually engaging and easy to read.

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