Cinco Fuerzas De Potter

The Five Forces
Competing for Profits
Understanding Michael Porter’s
Best-Known Framework

E x c e r p t e d fr o m

Understanding Michael Porter:
The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy
By

Joan Magretta
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Harvard Business Review Press
Boston, Massachusetts

ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-8893-4

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Copyright 2012 HarvardBusiness School Publishing Corporation
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This chapter was originally published as chapter 2 of Understanding Michael Porter:
The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy,
copyright 2012 Joan Magretta.
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C HAPTER 2

The Five Forces:
Competing for Profits

I

N THE LAST CHAPTER we covered one of the most

widespread misconceptions about competition: the

idea that success comes from “being the best.” Here we’ll tackle
another bigmisconception. Most people think of competition as a
direct contest between rivals. That’s the standard definition you’ll
find if you look it up. Apple wants to sell you an iPhone. Research In
Motion promotes its device, the BlackBerry. These two rivals engage
in a contest to win your smartphone business. Similarly, Yamaha competes with Steinway to sell you a piano. BMW and Audi compete tosell you a car, and Hyatt and Westin to rent you a hotel room.
But this way of thinking about competition is too narrow. The real
point of competition is not to beat your rivals. It’s not about winning a
sale. The point is to earn profits. Competing for profits is more complex. It’s a struggle involving multiple players, not just rivals, over who
will capture the value an industry creates. It’strue, of course, that
companies compete for profits with their rivals. But they are also
engaged in a struggle for profits with their customers, who would

2

UNDERSTANDING MICHAEL PORTER

always be happier to pay less and get more. They compete with their
suppliers, who would always be happier to be paid more and deliver
less. They compete with producers who make products that could, in
apinch, be substituted for their own. And they compete with potential rivals as well as existing ones, because even the threat of new
entrants places limits on how much they can charge their customers.

The real point of competition is not to beat
your rivals. It’s to earn profits.

These five forces—the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors, the bargaining power of buyers (theindustry’s customers), the
bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of substitutes, and the
threat of new entrants—determine the industry’s structure, an important concept that may sound academic but is not (figure 2-1). If you
look at a building, any building—a house, a church, a warehouse—its
structure immediately gives you important information about its use,
about how the building “works,” howit creates shelter by enclosing
space. The structure is determined by elements common to all buildings: the foundation, the walls, the roof. Similarly, you get important
information about an industry by looking at its structure. The particular configuration of Porter’s five forces tells you immediately how the
industry “works,” how it creates and shares value. It explains the
industry’s...