in 1985, the year Dubai’s ruling family started a small airline called Emirates to shuttle Pakistani workers between Karachi and Dubai aboard two leased planes. “Nobody believed Emirates could be a successful airline,” recalls Fekih, who now heads Air-bus’ Mideast subsidiary. “It was the joke of the day.”

Emirates is a joke no longer. It has grown into the world’s tenth-largest airline, earning $1.45 billion in profits in 2007 on sales of nearly $11.2 billion. One important factor underlying Emirates’ success is simply the geographic location of Dubai. It provides a convenient hub that has enabled Emirates to offer more convenient routes for business travelers shuttling between Europe or the United States and Asia. And the rapid growth of many Asian economies in recent years has, in turn, generated increased demand and new customers for Emirates’ flights. Of course, many other airlines fly between Asia and the West, so Emirates has attempted to strengthen and defend its share of that market by offering superior service. Its aggressive purchasing of new planes from both Boeing and Airbus gives it one of the youngest and most efficient fleets of any airline. And innovative services such as a 200-channel in-flight entertainment system and sumptuous travelers’ lounges have helped keep Emirates’ flights more than 70 percent full. Thus, Emirates is a good example of a service firm pursuing a differentiated analyzer strategy—it differentiates itself with superior service in competitive markets while developing new routes between Asia and the West to capture new customers in that rapidly growing segment of the business travel market.

GLOBAL BUSINESS STRATEGY

In terms of the strategies described in Exhibit 9.2 , businesses that compete in multiple global markets almost always pursue one of the two types of analyzer strategy. They must continue to strengthen and defend their competitive position in their home country—and perhaps in other countries where they are well