Blockchain strategies  179

SWOT: strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities and threats

Overview

SWOT is a strategic model to assess and analyse a company’s strengths,

weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Every organisation needs to assess

its capabilities to formulate a strategy to be competitive in the market. Using

fact- and data-based analysis through SWOT can provide insights to the

organisation, including what sectors, business or entity could succeed on

what kind of products or services and in what kind of global markets. SWOT

analysis involves collection of facts, data and insights from internal employ-

ees, investors, external consulting firms and even competitors.

This section will go through the SWOT model.

Areas assessed by SWOT

• Strengths: Assessment of an organisation’s strengths is an important

factor as it highlights its capabilities, uniqueness and niche to differen-

tiate itself from competitors using internal and external data. Some of

the examples of the strengths can be a strong brand, loyal customers,

a unique product/platform, a strong balance sheet and so on.

• Weaknesses: Weaknesses are the factors that can lead to stop or slow

down an organisation to perform at its optimum level. It is essential

for an organisation to know its weaknesses in the areas, so business

can focus on improvement plans to overcome them to remain com-

petitive. Some of the examples of weaknesses can be a weak brand,

high turnover of the staff and customers, a weak balance sheet with

a high level of debt, high overheads, an inadequate supply chain, lack

of resiliency, lack of capital allocation for innovation spend and so on.

• Opportunities: Opportunities refer to external factors that can be favour-

able to the organisation to have competitive advantages. Some of the

examples of external opportunities for an organisation are government

policy to cut value-added tax, approval of export of products to new mar-

kets, cut in corporate tax, launch of major transformation programmes by

Government that can use the organisation’s products or services and so on.

• Threats: Threats refer to external factors that have potential to harm

an organisation or have a negative impact. Some of the examples of

threats are natural disaster events (drought, flood, earthquake etc.),

an increase of corporation taxes, an increase in cost of raw material,

a rise in minimum wage for employees, lack of labour supply, issues

with supply chain and so on.

Application of SWOT on a company’s blockchain use case

Now that we understand the power and importance of SWOT analysis, we

will apply the SWOT model on blockchain use cases to assist in formulating

the blockchain strategy.