Empirical Research On Relationship Between Strategic Groups And Corporate Performance Of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Since the concept of strategic groups is proposed, it gets a lot of attention of strategic scholars and researchers, and becomes one of the topics in the field of strategic management. However, although the domestic and foreign scholars make a large number of empirical studies in many industries, such as bank, aviation, pharmaceutical, retail industry. The two core issues in strategic groups study have still not reached a unified conclusion. Most of scholars in the study of strategic groups in China only for a particular industry, have not been detailed system analysis of China manufacture companies. In recent years, with the rising of labor and land costs, the traditional advantages of China's manufacturing industry are no longer exist. With the lack of core technology and innovation ability, many companies have been closed down by the impact of the crises. In this context, how to take advantage of strategic groups within the theoretical analysis and response to the complex environment, building their own competitive advantage becomes a crucial proposition. Therefore, based on the background of Chinese manufacturing industry to study the relationship between strategic groups and performance, has important theoretical and practical significance.This paper firstly reviews a lot of literatures of strategic groups and firm performance in the field, in-depth analysis of the mechanism of the existence and stability of strategic groups, the impact of strategic groups on performance, and proposes some research hypotheses. Then, this paper takes the China's manufacturing listed companies from 2012 to 2013 as the subject, extracts the appropriate variables to build a strategic group identification system from the strategic dimension and enterprise resource dimension. Next, makes the division of strategic groups by using clustering analysis method with collected data; on this basis, finally using ANOVA analysis to test the relationship of strategic groups and firm performance.The results show that the presence of strategic groups in China's manufacturing industry, and there are significant performance differences between groups. Both in fast moving consumer goods industry and durable consumer goods industry, differentiation strategy group performance is far higher than the low-cost strategy group. According to the above conclusions, this paper presents the traditional manufacturing companies need to accelerate the pace of transformation and upgrading, create their own brands, enhance innovation capability, to gain a unique competitive advantage and sustained profit.