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Assignment Task

 

BACKGROUND

SEAT, S.A. is a Spanish automobile manufacturer with its head office in Martorell (near Barcelona), Spain. The firm has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Group since 1986.

The firm is strategically repositioning itself from a vehicle manufacturer to a provider of mobility services (i.e. where users pay for transportation only when they need it, rather than owning a personal vehicle that is not used most of the time), especially in increasingly crowded urban areas. 

As stated by Luca De Meo, the firm’s Chairman:

“We are convinced that vehicles will become the second largest connected platform after the mobile phone and we will have the chance to integrate them into a rich ecosystem. This transformation forces us to innovate and move beyond the scope of being just a carmaker, stretching our value chain towards new mobility services, platforms and data businesses”.

As part of this repositioning, SEAT has identified ‘compact urban mobility’ (short commutes less than 10 kilometres within the city environment, using a small vehicle) as a core area for strategic development. 

The firm unveiled its ‘Minim?’ concept vehicle at the 2019 Mobile World Congress to demonstrate SEAT’s vision of the ‘compact urban mobility’ of tomorrow. 

Integrating the fields of electrification, connectivity and shared mobility the ‘Minim?’ is a 2-passenger quadricycle primarily intended for business-to-consumer carsharing providers* that has been designed to:

  • have a considerably smaller ecological footprint (3.1 square metres) than a normal car (7.2 square metres) while providing safe, agile travel and easy parking

  • release zero emissions due to its all-electric powertrain

  • reduce the operating costs of carsharing providers by 50%, as the integrated battery-swap system means the vehicle rarely needs to be taken to a recharging point

  • provide a convenient and smooth digital user experience for users based on hyperconnectivity with built-in 5-G technology

  • allow the vehicle – in the future and subject to further development of autonomous technologies - to pick up the user when requested, thereby solving one of the main carsharing user pain points.

The ‘Minim?’ will go into production in 2022 (delayed from 2021 due to the global pandemic), leaving the firm with only 12 months to decide which city from across the globe will be most attractive for the product launch. 
SEAT’s international strategy team have already undertaken some initial desktop research and have identified Manchester (UK) and Melbourne (Australia) as potentially attractive cities for the product launch of the ‘Minim?’

As an external consultant, you have been commissioned by the team to research and evaluate these 2 cities and their wider macro environments in greater detail.

 Two of the main types of business-to-consumer car-sharing models are:
Station-based car sharing (e.g. Zipcar, Communauto, Maven) – the user only has a choice between a round trip (picking the car up at Station A and returning it to Station A), or a tightly-monitored one-way trip (picking the car up at Station A and returning it to Station B). Those who plan trips ahead of time or are looking for a car at a specific time would benefit from these services.
Free-floating carsharing (e.g. car2go, Gig or DriveNow) – the user can see which cars are available within a set operating area on a mobile app and choose the one closest to them. Once the user is finished using the car, they can drop off the car at any location within the set operating area, saving time and avoiding unnecessary trips. Those who are spontaneous and decide last-minute that they need a car would benefit from these services. 
NB the difference between car-sharing, ride-sharing and ride-hailing: 
Car-sharing = ‘I rent a car to drive now and park it when I’m finished; someone else will rent the same car later and drive it’; 
Ride-sharing = ‘the process in which a rider shares a vehicle with other riders.  It is not personal transportation, as the space is shared, and it will make stops to pick up other riders’;
Ride-hailing = ‘when a rider “hails” or hires a personal driver to take them exactly where they need to go. The transportation vehicle is not shared with any other riders, nor does it make several stops along a route. The ride is booked and paid for through a smartphone app with a transportation network company (TNC) such as Uber or Lyft’

 

Task

1. In order to identify which city is the most potentially attractive destination for the launch of the SEAT ‘Minim?’, you are required to undertake a comparative analysis of what you believe to be the most relevant city-level urban mobility and wider macro-environmental factors of Manchester and Melbourne. 

Task 1 must be presented in table format and must be no more than 8 pages in length.
Wider macro-environmental data should be recent, primarily quantitative and obtained from appropriate sources
City-level urban mobility data should be recent, primarily quantitative and obtained from appropriate sources 
A scoring system should be used for each city-level / wider macro-environmental factor for each city to show whether each factor is more or less attractive for the company. These scores should then be totalled for each city in order to arrive at a score of overall attractiveness for each city.
 


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  • Uploaded By : Roman
  • Posted on : February 13th, 2019

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