SnowSports Interactive - The Dilemmas of Being Born Global

"The best trick this winter won’t be done on skis or a board, it will be worn!" said Steve Kenny, CEO of Australian-based SnowSports Interactive. Steve was finishing up an early July 2006 presentation about SnowSports Interactive to a group of business professors. During the course of the presentation Steve explained a number of the strategic challenges the company faced with regard to its strategy --- including the risks address, the business model, and attracting investors. As he was finishing the presentation, Steve also talked about the company’s global strategy. He told the group, We currently have one location, i.e., Mt. Buller. We need to be in more resorts in Australia but there are only five major and four minor ski resorts here in this country. The most lucrative market, of course, is the USA where there are 493 ski resorts. We could focus on Japan, but that takes a different protocol and we would have to redesign our technology. However, we have had inquiries from Japan and there are a couple of people associated with Hoikkaido resorts. We need to think this through. History of the Company SnowSports was born over a beer in January 2004. SnowSports founders Steve Kenny, Michael Brett, and Shubber Ali first met at the Australian Space Development Conference of 2002 in Sydney. The trio met again at the Space Futures 2003 Conference in Melbourne which Steve helped organize and where Shubber was one of the keynote speakers. Over the January 2004 beer the two talked about a concept for a product to track skiers and snowboarders on a mountain using a combination of Global Positioning System (GPS) and 802.11 wireless technologies to track a skier’s location and provide other real time information such speed, number of runs, and vertical distance travelled. Although the initial product was envisioned as a skier tracker system, Steve and Shubber recognized that there were would be other wireless services that a system installed at ski resorts could provide.