Title: China's manufacturing servitisation level and its impact on enterprise performance: model and empirical study

Authors: Jifei Xie

Addresses: School of Management, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao, Qinhuangdao 066004, China

Abstract: To more comprehensively and objectively evaluate China's manufacturing servitisation level, and to further examine the impact of servitisation level on enterprise performance, so as to clarify the inconclusive findings from literature, this study constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system and a fuzzy evaluation model of servitisation level, and carries out an empirical study on China's manufacturing servitisation level and its impact on enterprise performance based on the data of 903 listed enterprises in 29 manufacturing industries in eight provinces and cities in China in 2017. The results show that: servitisation has an obvious metropolitan priority characteristic; high-tech industries are in leading positions in servitisation; there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between servitisation level and both return on equity and return on total assets, and there is a U-shaped relationship between servitisation level and return on personnel; the overall servitisation level of China's manufacturing enterprises is relatively low, and there is much room for development; in terms of human capital investment, the manufacturing enterprises are facing 'servitisation paradox'; for manufacturing enterprises in the servitisation process, relatively concentrated equity rights, the realisation of scale effect and an reasonable capital structure will help to improve performance.

Keywords: servitisation; enterprise performance; index system; China; fuzzy evaluation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2021.114077

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2021 Vol.37 No.4, pp.477 - 505

Received: 18 Oct 2018
Accepted: 02 Jul 2019
Published online: 08 Apr 2021 *

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