A Brief Discussion On The Corporate Strategic Alliances

With the globalization of the economy and rapid development of technology, international competition of the recent two decades has become increasingly intense and complicated. It has become increasingly intense and complicated. It has been more and more difficult for any company to compete singe-handed in international and home market, no matter what large scale and what powerful potentiality it has. As a kind of loose organization or conduct stressing cooperation and win-win, strategic alliance has sprung up in large scale, especially from the 90's In international competition, enterprise in our country should not only adapt to the market economy by establishing modern enterprise system, but also gear themselves to the world standard from the angle of strategic management.Because the industrial constitution within an enterprise has become gradually vague, and the major resources have gone beyond the limit of a single enterprise towards enterprise groups or networks, then in order to obtain a long-term competition advantage, the former industrial structure theory and resource-based theory have become limited. Characterized by mutual share of property right or under most conditions, no exchanges of property right; alliance, the low-cost Institution arrangement, will enlarge the range of the available resources in an enterprise, thus enhances the competition advantage for the enterprise. In view of the transaction costs, alliance can also be regarded as an intermediate management strategy when an enterprise finds it hard to compare clearly between the costs of market transaction and amalgamation. And the cost of establishing and managing this intermediate organization is obviously not only lower than the increase of cost and management expenses caused by amalgamation, but also than the market transaction costs. Moreover, the loose organization of the alliance will provide the flexibility for a member enterprise to distinguish and be geared to the market opportunities, and the possibility of mutual learning and development. The advantages shown in its system and management have made alliance a new competition thought and method. However, it is just this loose co-operation that will bring about its biggest disadvantage: the opportunist conduct of the member enterprises. To overcome this malpractice, it is of vital importance to cultivate and produce a kind of trust system. In practice, although some Chinese enterprises have shown their interest in strategic alliance, they are still in an early stage. It is worth advocating, no matter for adapting to the changes of the current circumstances or to face the pressure of Chinese entrance of WTO. However, more significant is its promotion to Chinese enterprise market co-operation and the externalizing reform of major state-own enterprises. Meanwhile, in specific application, the problems we should first deal with are not those of the micro-management, but some macro-problems concerning the patterns, the distribution and application conditions of the alliance.