Title: Empirical analysis on Chinese self-brand automobile enterprises' competitive advantage

Authors: Xianjun Li, Li Pang

Addresses: Department of Automotive Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. ' Department of Automotive Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Abstract: Nowadays, China has become the third largest automaker country in the world. But the quantitative research on Chinese automobile enterprises| competitive advantage is not enough. In this paper, we evaluate the competitive advantage of Chinese self-brand automobile enterprises by using AHP model and OLS, and analyse the relationship between the performance and R&D, scale, operational efficiency, and export feature. The results indicate that there is non-equilibrium among the scale, operational efficiency, R&D, innovation performance, growth potential and export feature of Chinese self-brand automobile enterprise; the advantages of passenger car and special colonies are scale, operational efficiency, innovation performance and export feature, but their disadvantage is insufficient growth potential. There is polarisation in commercial vehicles; automobile enterprises that product truck and bus have superior competitive advantage, but the disadvantage is low R&D investment and operational efficiency. Automobile enterprises that only product truck or bus have small scale and low innovation performance. As for leading automobile enterprises, the new automobile enterprises show superior competitive advantage through comparing them to the traditional ones.

Keywords: China; automobile industry; automotive manufacturing; competitive advantage; self-branding; performance measurement; R&D; scale; operational efficiency; export features; research and development; innovation performance; commercial vehicles; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; OLS; ordinary least squares.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLIC.2010.034375

International Journal of Learning and Intellectual Capital, 2010 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.374 - 393

Published online: 01 Aug 2010 *

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