S.A. Chupa Chups Case Preparation
S.A. Chupa Chups is a Spanish company, manufacturing and selling sweet products. Founded in 1957 by Enrique Bernat, it has built its empire around one single product: a lollipop. It now has manufacturing plants in five countries, many subsidiaries in distribution, trading, banking, marketing, confectionary machine manufacturing and insurance, and trades in 130 countries around the world.
Early Strategy: concentrate on one product for domestic market
In 1957, After Enrique Bernat failed to convince the board of S.A. Granja Asturias, a sweets manufacturer in Asturias (central north Spain), the company that he has been working for as a general manager for two years, to impose a change in its strategy from concentrating on selling hundreds of sweets products in just one market to concentrating only on producing one product but for several markets, he decided to takeover the company and rename it to Chupa Chups.
As a result of the takeover, the company imposed the new strategy right away and with the vision of Bernat, it chose to concentrate on lollipop as its only product. Bernat came up with an idea of lollipop on a stick after remembering how children would get stain on their clothes from consuming sweets. Chupa Chups introduced its first lollipop in 1958 with a slogan "Chupa un Chups" (suck a sucker), however, the name was changed three years later to Chupa Chups.
Later Strategy: internationalization
Developing markets in developed countries
After having been very successful in the domestic market, Chupa Chups had to make a critical decision of whether to diversify its operations into other confectionary and food products or to try to sell its current products to other markets by going abroad. I ...