Strategic Group And Mobility Barriers Analysis On 3PL Industry In China

With the fast development of world economy and the improvement of modern science technology, logistics industry as a rising service department in civil economy has deserved great attention. Logistics has been considered as the foundational industry and the artery of civil economy development in the world, and its developing degree is one of the most significant factors of measuring one country's modernization and Comprehensive National Power. What's more, if one enterprise wants to succeed from the intensive competition it must pay great attention to its logistics costs.It has been more than 30 years since the concept of strategic group was brought forward. Although many scholars had applied it to all kinds of industries, they never attached it to the logistics industry, so this paper trys its best to analyze the 3PL enterprises about the difference of strategies they adapted and the mobility barriers they encountered by applying strategic group theories.This dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter 1: A brief introduction that covers areas: research background, research goal, contents and framework, improvements and initiative.Chapter 2:Literature review and comment. This chapter introduces relative theoretical research systemically, including three aspects. That is strategic group, mobility barriers and third party logistics theories.Chapter 3 depicts the current situation of the whole industry environment and industry competency in third party logistics enterprises, and chooses the industrial key success factors to classify the logistics industry into several strategic groups.Chapter 4 applys the SWOT tool to analyze the enterprises of different strategic group. It explains the mobility barriers among different strategic groups and makes some strategies for every strategic group in the future.Chapter 5 is the conclusions and suggestions. It points out the shortage and the contribution of this dissertation. It also gives some suggestions to 3PL enterprises according to this research results. This can be the reference for the enterprises makingtheir own strategies.There are few dissertations on strategic group in domestic research. The innovation of this dissertation is its choosing third party logistics industry as its research object and analyzing it from the strategic group point of view. This paper only combined to qualitative analysis, but lack of quantative analysis, for the difficult acquisition of logistics enterprises data. It does not analyze the performance of different strategic group and its course yet.