Small Firms' Strategic Responses to the Advancement of Industry Life Cycle

这项研究的目的是对小企业应该采用什么类型的战略以在一段时间内保持高绩效的问题给出一个经验性的答案。“小企业”一般指的是所谓的中小企业。然而，由于可获得适当的数据，本研究使用了东京和/或大阪证券交易所上市的最小类别的公司作为样本。从这项为期两年的研究项目中获得的各种有趣的发现总结如下：第一，本研究中的主要假设，即为了在整个行业生命周期中保持高盈利能力，小企业倾向于根据行业生命周期的不同阶段，如引入阶段或衰落阶段，采用不同类型的产品线战略，这一假设根本没有得到最小类别的上市工业品制造商的支持。事实上，业绩最好的最小上市工业品生产商往往在盈利能力和销售增长方面都表现出持续的高表现，而它们的产品线在大约20-30年的时间里没有重大变化。即使在以钢铁或化工为典型代表的成熟行业，规模最小的高表现上市公司的增长也远远高于行业增长。第二，上述事实表明，这些公司的成功是以牺牲竞争对手的市场份额为代价的。对表现良好的样本公司的财务分析结果清楚地表明，它们一直在努力削减电子或汽车零部件等成长型行业的过剩成本，而不是停滞不前的行业。因此，我们建议停滞不前行业中业绩良好的小型上市生产商采用成本领先战略，以保持其在盈利能力和销售增长方面的优势。

The purpose of this research was to give an empirical answer to the question of what types of strategies small firms should employ in order to maintain high performance over time. "Small-sized firms" in general refer to the so-called small and medium firms. Due to the availability of appropriate data, however, this study used the smallest class of firms as its sample which are listed on the Tokyo and/or Osaka stock exchanges. Various interesting findings obtained from the two-year research project are summarized as follows.First, the main hypothesis in this study, "To maintain high profitability over the industry life cycle, small firms tend to employ different types of product-line strategies according to different stages of the cycle such as the introduction stage or the declining stage," was not supported at all by the smallest class of listed industrial goods manufacturers. High-performing smallest listed producers of industrial goods, in fact, tend to show sustained high performance both in profitability and in sales growth without significant changes in their product lines over a period of some 20-30 years. Even in matured industries typically represented by the steel industry or the chemical industry, the smallest high-performing listed firms have been growing far above industry growth.Second, the above mentioned fact suggests that these firms have been successful at the cost of their competitors' market share. Results of financial analysis on the high-performing sample firms clearly show that they have been trying to slash excess costs more in growing industries such as electronics or automobile parts than in stagnating industries. It is accordingly suggested that high-performing small listed producers in stagnating industries have employed cost leadership strategies to maintain their numbers both in profitability and in sales growth.