External and Internal Forces Impacting upon the Future Strategic Direction of the Scandinavian Airlines System Group: Lessons from Air Canada

External and Internal Forces Impacting upon the Future Strategic Direction of the Scandinavian Airlines System Group: Lessons from Air Canada

Nowadays, all organisations are faced with the challenges of strategic development. The strategy literature has argued that organisations must continuously reconfigure their resources in rapidly-changing environments, because turbulent environments destroy the value of existing competencies. An important differentiating means is thus strategic flexibility. However, it is not easy to forecast the outlook for the international airline industry in an increasingly volatile world. Especially, airline industry supports 58 million jobs and contributes $2.4 trillion to the economy. In Europe, aviation supports nearly 12 million jobs and some $860 billion of GDP. Also, Europe’s airlines are the weakest amongst the world’s major regions and a post-tax net profit of $2.8 billion this year, for an average net profit margin of just 1.3%. Therefore the purpose of this research is to use the suitable strategy model, concepts and theories, critically analyse those external and internal forces impacting upon the future strategic direction of the SAS Group lesson from Air Canada.