Factors of Competitiveness: Why the Enterprise is Less Successful? The Case of Czech enterprises
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Applied Financial Economics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Economy |
| Keywords | competitive advantage; efficiency; stakeholders; clustering; financial analysis |
| Description | This article is based on an empirical survey performed by the Research Centre for Competitiveness of the Czech Economy in 2007. The survey covered a stratified sample of 432 Czech (mostly industrial) companies. The subject of the article is competitiveness of companies. We argue that competitiveness is a qualitative property of a company, which is reflected in its financial performance, assuming that the more able a company is to compete, the better performance it reaches. In that respect a high performing, efficient company will be qualitatively different from a low performing, inefficient one. In other words, it will have different parameters (characteristic features) of studied qualitative variables. The characteristics are based on the stakeholder model of the corporation used by Donaldson and Preston in which a corporation can be characterized from the point of view of various interest groups. Furthermore, it is assumed that the principal groups are formed by owners, employees, creditors (investors), general public (state), customers and suppliers, to name the primary stakeholders (Donaldson, Preston, 1995). Individual groups are then analyzed according to their specific and particularly qualitative characteristics We start from division of the sample into several clusters of companies according to their financial performance (measured by standard measures as ROA). Using advanced statistical methods : particularly statistical method of pattern recognition developed by UTIA (Czech academy of Sciences) and modified in a special way for the purpose of our research : we formulate twenty qualitative characteristics, which can cause uncompetitiveness of the selected firm. These characteristics are then discussed and basic recommendations are drawn. |
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