Research On The Relationship Between Technological Diversification And Performance Of "Poor" Enterprises

The high-tech enterprises have been vigorously supported in recent years,which become an important link for establishing the innovation-driven development system.With the rapid development of S&T areas,the market environment for high-tech enterprises is full of unpredictability and unknown risks.It may be difficult for the companies,who have single key technologies capability in a certain field,to cope with the uncertainty and complexity of the external environment.A large number of enterprises have taken the initiative to improve their technical capabilities to actively meet the challenges.Although the academic circle has been paying attention to the relationship between technological diversification and enterprise performance for nearly 20 years,there are still different conclusions: many scholars have empirically verified that technological diversification promotes the improvement of corporate financial performance,while some has believed that technological diversification affects corporate performance negatively through empirical tests,others have held the opinions that there is an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between technological diversification and enterprise performance.This paper holds that there are two main reasons for the differences in the above research conclusions: one is that the development status of enterprises is not fully considered for the reason that scholars uniformly simplified the business conditions of enterprises.More specifically,they did not consider whether enterprises were in a "poor" state or whether business operations were in a benign development stage.The other one is that the technological diversification was regarded as a whole variable without considering the influence of the technological diversification of different structures and the financial performance of enterprises.Technological diversification can be divided into related technological diversification and unrelated technological diversification from the perspective of knowledge correlation.In the process of implementing technological diversification,enterprises must not only enhance the capabilities in the technical fields associated with core technological areas(ie,implement related technological diversification)but also explore non-core technological areas(ie,implement unrelated technological diversification),and technological diversification of different structures have different effects on corporate financial performance.In order to solve the problems above,this study divides the high-tech enterprises in the “poor” state into three types: financially poor enterprise,aspiration gap enterprise,and organizational decline enterprise,from three different perspectives-financial distress,psychological expectations of enterprise decision-makers and the duration of “poor” status—based on the previous research.According to the definitions and measurement standards of the three types of “poor” enterprises,combined with the Notice on the classification of high-tech industries(manufacturing)(2017)by the National Bureau of Statistics of China,three “poor” types of high-tech companies(manufacturing)that meet the criteria were strictly screened out from 3,616 domestic A-share listed companies.By analyzing the technological diversification states of the sample enterprises,it is found that more than 91.5% of the “poor” types of high-tech enterprises(manufacturing)in 2012-2016 have implemented technological diversification strategies.Evidence from empirical research in this paper shows that:(1)There is a non-linear relationship between technological diversification and performance of enterprises in "poverty" state.When the enterprise is in the state of financial poverty and organizational decline,the relationship between technological diversification and enterprise performance shows a negative correlation.When the enterprise is in the state of expectation fall,the relationship between technological diversification and enterprise performance shows a positive U-shaped relationship.These are different from the previous scholars' conclusion that there are positive,negative or inverted U-shaped relationship between technological diversification and firm performance.(2)There is a non-linear relationship between the diversification of related technologies and the performance of enterprises in "poverty" state.When the enterprise is in the expected gap,the relationship between related technology diversification and enterprise performance presents a positive U-shaped relationship;when the enterprise is in the state of organizational decline and financial distress,the relationship between related technology diversification and enterprise performance is not significant.(3)Non-related technology diversification has a negative relationship with the performance of enterprises in "poverty" state.Whether an enterprise is in a state of financial distress,expectation gap and organizational decline,the relationship between diversification of non-related technologies and enterprise performance is negatively correlated.(4)The core technological competence of enterprises plays a positive moderating role between technological diversification and performance of enterprises in "poverty" state.For enterprises in financial distress and organizational decline,the core technological capabilities of enterprises play a positive regulatory role.For enterprises in the expected gap,the regulation of core technological capability is not significant.(5)Regional intellectual property protection plays a positive moderating role between technological diversification and the performance of enterprises in "poverty" state.For enterprises in financial distress,expectation gap and organizational decline,regional intellectual property protection plays a positive regulatory role.(6)For the same kind of "poor" enterprises,under the premise of the same impact relationship,the impact of different technological diversification on enterprise performance is different.Specifically,for enterprises in financial distress and organizational decline,technological diversification and non-related technological diversification are negatively correlated with corporate performance;but on the premise of improving the same level,the extent of performance reduction of enterprises with technological diversification is smaller than that of enterprises with non-related technological diversification.For enterprises in the expected gap,technology diversification and related technology diversification have a positive U-shaped relationship with enterprise performance.However,before reaching the inflection point of the positive U-shaped,on the premise of improving the same level,the performance of enterprises implementing technology diversification will be reduced less than that of related technology diversification enterprises.After reaching the inflection point,on the premise of raising the same level,the performance improvement of enterprises with technology diversification is less than that of enterprises with related technology diversification.The innovations of this paper may have the following three aspects: First,in order to objectively and comprehensively reveal the financial performance relationship between technological diversification and enterprises in the “poor” state,this study not only broke the hypothesis that the enterprises had been defined simplistically as “financial distress” by most of the previous works but also attributed the expectation gap and organized decline enterprises into the “poor” enterprises referred in this paper,from the perspective of the psychological expectations of policy-makers and the duration of the “poor” state of the enterprise.To a certain extent,it has extended the category of the previous “poor” enterprises.Second,this paper rethought the research deficiencies of assuming companies always in a constant state of management in previous research.The domestic A-share listed high-tech enterprises(manufacturing)in the three “poor” states,represented by financial poverty,expectation gap,and organizational decline,were the focus of research.This research discussed the relationship between technological diversification and the financial performance of domestic A-share listed high-tech enterprises(manufacturing)of three types of “poor” and planned to further enrich the research situation of the relationship between technological diversification and corporate financial performance,which was conducive to the integration of scholars' per-contradictory research conclusions.Third,considering the limitations of the previous research on technological diversification as a whole variable.Therefore,this paper further studied the financial performance relationships between related technologies diversification,unrelated technologies diversification and domestic A-share listed high-tech enterprises(manufacturing)of three types of “poor” and intended to further enrich the research situations of related technological diversification and unrelated technological diversification with corporate financial performance.What's more,this paper further studies the internal mechanism of the relationship between related technology diversification,non related technology diversification and the performance of three types of "poor" enterprises.Taking the absorptive capacity and technology integration capacity as intermediary variables,this paper studies the internal mechanism of the performance of different structural technology diversification and three types of "poor" state enterprises,in order to provide theoretical reference for domestic A-share listed high-tech enterprises(Manufacturing)in three "poor" state to carry out different structural technology diversification.