The Dynamic Competition Of Chinese Household Appliance Industry From The Perspective Of Multi - Point Contact

This study mainly combines the theory of multi-point competition with the practices of China’s household appliances firms to examine the influence of multi-point contact on the performance of firms from a systematic perspective. Traditional studies all focus on exploring the relationship between firms’performance and some specific market level or firm level factors featuring multi-point contact by carrying out empirical analysis. In those studies, several hypotheses were proposed and examined statistically. Due to the data availability and accuracy confinement, most studies concentrate on airline, banking, insurance, and hotel industries. Few researches on multi-point competition of household appliances industry can be found. Besides, as the questions delivered in those studies are very specific and quantitative related, there lacks an overall picture of the competitive dynamics of the whole industry. Therefore, in this study, a framework of influence of multi-point contact on household appliances industry was developed. I first tried to explore on industrial level the link between the development of China’s household appliances industry and the formation of multi-point contact. Then firm level studies were carried out through connecting firms’horizontal expansion strategy with multi-product competition and vertical integration strategy with multi-value chain function competition. Further, specific competitive moves relating actions of multi-point contact of the big players were observed and analyzed on action level. The study found that the multi-point contact was quite substantial in China’s household appliances industry but the intensity of competition seemed not lowered, which was contrary to empirical findings. Thus, possible explanations were proposed and I finally recommended several improvement steps firms can follow on how to bring the effect of multi-point competition into full play.