Project 4 asks you to put together a marketing plan for a client with the goal of increasing sales to other businesses in the United States. This projects has been broken down into several smaller tasks in multiple steps; each task will help you create one piece of a complete marketing plan.

Create a 3 page report focusing on Porter’s five forces analysis—Porter’s five forces analysis is a framework that can help the company understand the competitive forces at play in its industry. These forces may influence how economic value is divided among the company’s competitors in the industry (Porter, 2008).

The company you are assigned is Canadian Solar Inc.

• Which elements have the biggest impact on the company’s success?
• What factors affect the company’s customers (other businesses)?

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.