Setting a business strategy to weather the telecommunications industry downturn by using fuzzy MCDM

Telecommunications deregulation, the exponential increase in internet IP applications, and the emergence of 3G broadband mobile services have created tremendous growth in the telecommunications industry in the past few years. However, the recent abrupt economic slowdown has resulted in mass corporate restructuring and workforce realignment in the telecommunications industry. During this telecommunications downturn, how to promptly implement a business strategy to weather the economic storm has become a critical issue. Often, corporations do not know how to evaluate a company's qualitative issues while setting a business strategy. This, in turn, could cause long-term negative impact on a corporation. The purpose of this paper is to help corporations in evaluating fuzzy qualitative issues during business development by employing a fuzzy MCDM method. An empirical formula is employed as an example to examine the practicability and usefulness of this method. Study results show that the R&D focus has the highest ranking among all of the strategies examined.