Panamericana libreria s.a. vs. office depot colombia

Task: Panamericana Libreria S.A. vs. Office Depot Colombia
1. Please compare the competitive priorities of these two companies – to what extend do they differ?
Among products that people use during every day life, one can find many products from the field of school and office supplies, paper and all related products. Two companies covering those markets in Colombia are Panamericana LibreriaS.A. and Office Depot Colombia. The following paragraph will compare the competitive priorities of those two competitors.
Panamericana, founded in 1961 en Bogotá as a simple book store, has been expanding and growing actively ever since. Nowadays they count 22 stores in Bogotá alone and are present in the cities of Neiva, Villavicencio, Barranquilla, Cúcuta, Cartagena, Medellín y Valledupar. Theirbasic product lines consist of a book store also stocking school and university texts, school and office supplies, art and specialized supplies, technology and information technology, gifts and teaching materials. Therefore, their customer base consists of office workers, as well as school children, students, hobby-and professional artists. They exclusively sell their products via their storesplus offering a service of “domicilios”.
The US American company Office Depot, on the other hand, owns more than 1600 stores worldwide but only a few in Colombia in the cities of Bogotá, Cali and Medellín. They offer only office supplies but with many broad product lines, the main ones being office related items, furniture, technology and even services such as a copy center and BSD. BSD (BusinessService Division) is their own service offering solutions to companies how to decrease their overall costs. Therefore, their main target market is companies and office workers. Their main sales channels consist of their stores, telemarketing, internet sales, and representatives employed to offer specialized services directly to companies.

Competitive Priorities
Panamericana’s competitivepriorities lie clearly with quality and flexibility. In their mission statement they emphasize their goal to establish solid relationships with their customers by offering good service. They want to achieve this by accompanying their customers all the way throughout their buying experience. Furthermore, they aim to be competitive by following sustainable practices and to be the first choice whencustomers want a broad scope of specialized products (Panamericana Libreria S.A., 2006). This indicates that their competitive priorities lie with quality in terms of offering top quality consistently, and flexibility in terms of offering a high variety of products.
When comparing those competitive priorities with those of Office Depot, it becomes evident that they differ on two levels.
Office Depotputs customer needs in first place in order to guarantee customer satisfaction at all times. Additionally, they emphasize that they want to provide their customers with the most complete offer in terms of price, quality, variety and stock. This indicates that Office Depot not only incorporates the competitive priorities of top and consistent quality and flexibility in terms of variety offered, butalso the priorities of lead time and low cost. By trying to always offer the highest stock they ensure a fast, on-time delivery. Furthermore, they try to always advertise the lowest prices even offering to decrease their initial offer by 55% in case a customer can prove to have seen a cheaper offer somewhere else.
It can be concluded that Office Depot follows a broader scope of competitivepriorities in comparison to Panamericana.

2. Which of the business models in its current form fits better with emerging market characteristics being present in countries like Colombia? Why? Please provide a detailed explanation.
The following paragraph will discuss the business models of the two companies Panamericana S.A and Office Depot and evaluate them in terms of suitability in the...