Strategic Partnership Practices and Performance of Safaricom Plc Kenya

Abstract

The realm of business and its environment is changing. Today, a number of factors including internationalization, artificial intelligence, diminishing resources, decreasing markets, increased substitutes, ever advancing technology and increased consumer awareness are dictating competitive advantage. Success now depends on how strategically innovative one gets and how effective the line of fit is between the strategy and the objective. Among the measures that business put in place include the use of strategic tools such as partnerships, alliances, acquisitions and mergers and licensing. As preventive, reactive and corrective measures. These tools use executed to enhance the gain of competitive advantage as well as economies of scale. Each of these tools has its own unique approach to dealing with competitive threats. In particular, partnership, and as the most effective tools, allows the use of partnership practices in gaining all possible provisions by the other partner(s). The assumption is that with the practices, performance is enhanced through the gained competitive advantage. Based on this assumption, this study therefore sought to establish the influence of strategic partnership practices on performance of Safaricom. Dynamic capability and resource-based view theories were used to demonstrate the inherent relationship. Descriptive research design was used along with purposively sampled response unit and content analysis technique. Findings show that Safaricom PLC is highly utilizing the partnership strategy. Further, the results show that all the four strategic partnership practices under observation are equally applied in the partnerships. However, their application is not uniform, as not all practices are used in each and every partnership MoU. Each partnership was therefore found to have a unique combination of the practices. In conclusion, the study found a positive influence of the strategic partnership practices on performance of Safaricom PLC. During analysis the study fall short of the practices, identifying has a limitation that only four factor practices were considered. Another limitation was that the analysis technique was not sufficient enough to express the levels of influence. Hence suggestion that further research be conducted using quantitative approach on all applicable partnership practices.