Strategy Consulting for an Emerging Cement Company

The following case study has been developed based on LightCastle’s work for an emerging cement company. 

The Opportunity

One of the leading local conglomerates in Bangladesh, with a renowned brand of cement in the market, was in dire need of strategic intervention in order to capture a larger market share.  The company with a production capacity of 4700 MT/day was not operating at optimal capacity and despite increased branding efforts, there’s been a minimum increase in sales. Hence, the management decided to take a deeper look into the industry and analyze internal strengths to identify specific action points to improve the status quo and take a position among the top 5.

Our Approach

In order to help our client gain a stronger footing and challenge its competitors, LightCastle embarked on deep-dive research of the cement industry and gain knowledge of critical industry drivers. Currently, the industry holds an installed capacity of 33-35 Mn MT with an efficient supply of 25-27 Mn MT. The existing demand however hovers around 18-20 Mn MT. Our client would need to effectively challenge the top 5 market leaders with optimized marketing, distribution, and sales strategy in order to gain a higher position in the market.

We segmented the market research into a fourfold structure utilizing the Boston Consulting Group’s ‘Challenge The Leader®’ Framework. We took a look at the market fundamentals, the position our client currently holds in the industry, what strategic changes the company would need to implement in order to gain higher market share, and lastly, we developed an impact measurement framework to validate desired outcomes. We then conducted a nationwide retail and consumer survey followed by in-depth Key Informant Interviews to validate the results. The nationwide market results were the backbone of the strategic approaches formulated by LightCastle for this project.

The Future

Analyzing through multiple strategic lenses we formulated three basic strategic actions that would be needed to be implemented by our client.

• Their current sales strategy would need to be overhauled and a more focused and trimmed strategy would need to be implemented to cater to the market demand.
• Their management structure is in need of a reshuffle with proper resources placed on inappropriate roles in order to maximize work productivity and employee satisfaction.
• Large and lucrative government-based projects need to be captured in order to maximize sales and production capacity.