Competitive priorities of enterprises in mainland China

Fierce competition in today's global markets has forced enterprises to improve their quality, cost, delivery, new product introduction speed, customer services, and the ability to be innovative. These six competitive factors are vital to the success of an enterprise. Enterprises in China are now facing a life and death transition in the dynamic market-driven economy. China's entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will create more fierce competition in China's market and will, inevitably, speed up the life and death process of Chinese enterprises. In this paper, we study the competitive priorities of 138 enterprises in mainland China by investigating the importance of these different priorities over the next 5 years, and their perceived strength relative to their primary competitors. We assess the reliability of the competitive priority instrument used in the Boston University Manufacturing Features Survey. The result shows that innovativeness, after-sale services, quality, and flexibility will become the most important competitive priorities among these Chinese enterprises in the next 5 years. Most of the companies also believe that they are stronger than their major competitors in the most important competitive priority areas. However, they believe that they have a lower level of relative strength in the area of innovativeness.

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