Swot Analysis Of Costco

In this section, we mainly focus on the economic conditions about Costco. Firstly, we will focus on the whole North American market in order to introduce the landscape. Then, we will analyze the trends and viewers that relate specifically to the retail business. Last but not least, we will introduce the company-specific issues in detail.

The economic environment throughout North America has increased economic growth. The United States and Canada belong to the Top 10 economic powers around the world. The economic scale of the United States ranks first in the world, while Canada reaches 10th. The overall growth outlook for North American economies are encouraging. Traced back to the years of 2007 and 2008, the global financial crisis broke out due to the sub-prime housing crisis and tightening credit for consumers and businesses. At that time, not only the economies of North America

The U. S. government allocated 700 billion US dollars into the financial market to purchase the illiquid real estate collateral securities to rescue the economy, which increased the liquidity of sub-prime market and reduced the loss of the financial institutions that hold these securities (New York Times, 2008). Meanwhile, national governments corporately took measures to combat this crisis. Since then, the economy has gradually recuperated their economic operation. According to Figure 1, the unemployment rate has decreased from 10% at the end of 4 months in 2009 to approximately 5.5% at the beginning of 2015. The tight supervision of the Canadian financial system helped the Canadian economy to get rid of the influence of global financial crisis. From Figure 2, we can see that the Canadian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen since the year of 2010. However, recently, “A number of recent developments suggest a possible deterioration of Canada’s economic prospects,” the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada said on March 21. The international oil prices