The economic system, and thus an industry – in the traditional sense – is a collection of interrelated economic entities participating in the exchange of goods and money.
Relationships between companies here can only have a purely market-based character of exchange. Changes to this approach were initiated by the development of industry organization theory. Thus, M.E. Porter writes that every sector has its basic structure, i.e., a set of fundamental economic and technical characteristics that cause the occurrence of five competitive forces within it.
These are: rivalry among existing competitors, the bargaining power of industry buyers, the bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of substitute products, and the threat of new entrants. The state of competition in a given industry depends on these forces. In individual sectors, different forces play the main role in shaping competition, e.g., in the car tire industry, these are powerful suppliers to car companies and tough competitors. In this view, the economy as a whole ceases to appear as a homogeneous system from a regulatory point of view. Porter points to the need to study relationships between companies, but they only concern (as in neoclassical theories) rivalry.
Today, even M.E. Porter’s industry model is not enough to analyze a company’s environment. In the relational approach, the economic structure of the network is characterized to a greater extent by the role of leaders and partners. Networks are created as a result of horizontal and vertical alliances. A single company participates in various forms of relationships and performs diverse functions in the network. Between car manufacturers – who are competitors – various forms of relationships can occur. The same forms of relationships can be distinguished by observing the relations between individual car manufacturers and their suppliers and buyers. Additionally, a component manufacturer (and a finished car consists of 2,000 to 4,000 parts) supplies them to manufacturers of many car brands and cooperates with various own suppliers and buyers, which causes the mutual intersection of individual chains, which ultimately form a network that is difficult to identify.
Several degrees of enterprise cooperation forms can be distinguished, assigning specific forms of supply chain cooperation to them – from those characterized by one-off, sporadic buy-sell transactions, to company ties involving capital commitment (see Fig. 1). Some of these forms can be called a strategic alliance. The concept of an alliance is not yet clearly defined. Some believe that strategic alliances are associations connecting a company with its cooperators into “extended enterprises” or “enterprise constellations”. Since strategic alliances contain goals shared and declared by all partners, they may therefore seem to be forms similar to “relational” strategies.
Horizontal alliances
Strategic alliances, according to M. Maternowska, can be divided into three groups. The first type is complementary alliances, concluded between competitors possessing diverse but complementary assets and competencies. Each partner is responsible for carrying out tasks closest to their skills. The second type of alliance is close integration. In this case, partners possess similar competencies and strive to achieve sufficiently large business scale or reduce risk. The partners are companies with a similar market position. The manufactured products are of a substitutive nature, so competition between partners remains open. In order to achieve economies of scale from the implementation of a separate production stage, the Ford and PSA Peugeot Citroën groups concluded an agreement in 1998, under which a joint venture was established to develop and produce diesel engines. The agreement concluded at that time covered joint units with a capacity of 1.4; 1.6; 2.0 liters, and 2.7 V6. Now both groups plan to expand cooperation to include further units for commercial vehicles. DaimlerChrysler and General Motors also signed an agreement in Detroit, according to which they will jointly develop and implement a hybrid drive (combustion-electric). Both groups are working together because, in the field of hybrid drive, they have been outpaced by Toyota and Honda, as well as Ford, which sells a hybrid SUV built on the basis of Toyota’s drive. The third type of alliance is an additive alliance. It consists of an alliance of enterprises with similar assets and competencies, jointly manufacturing and selling a product. Unlike complementary alliances, in this case, the skills and contributions of the partners are of a similar nature, and their common goal is to obtain a sufficiently large scale of production. One product hits the market. Additive alliances cover the entire value chain. E.g., the PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) groups developed a small-car model and jointly built a factory in Kolin, Czech Republic, named
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka”, No. 3/2006.