Study Of The Core Competitiveness Of Chinese Telecom Companies

Since the concept of core competence was first brought forward by C.KPrahalad and Gary Hamel in 1990, core competence (CC) has beenwidely discussed in the academic world around western countries.Enterprisers are also interested in it, since most of them have realized thatcore competence is the source of maintaining firm's competitiveadvantage. In the late 1990s, the core competence theory was introducedinto China. It soon drew the wide attention of academics.Since the 21st century, the market environment of telecommunicationsindustry has changed dramatically as is evidenced by the increasingpenetration of economic globalization, joining into WTO, breaking upmonopoly, introducing competition and deregulating intelecommunications industry. These changes made the market much morecompetitive than ever before. Therefore, companies look for ways tomaintain competitive advantage and sustain ever-lasting development.After experiencing the big decrease on their AUPR and profit caused by"vicious price wars", firms realized that only core competence can helpthem survive the intense competition. However, due to the lack of thetheoretical research in this field, the practice of firms is also far fromsatisfactory and, this research on this topic is quite meaningful boththeoretically and practically.To the best of my knowledge, the existing research regarding CC isrelatively scattered and not systematic. In addition, there is nowell-accepted definition of CC. In order to provide a foundation for thefurther study in the thesis, a broad definition and the corresponding natureof CC are specified. From there, a specific telecommunications firm's CCand its nature are identified. In order to improve CC, an objective evaluation of a firm's currentsituation is crucial. First of all, a value chain model, which is based onPoter's value chain theory and associated with the nature of thetelecommunications firm, is built up. Based on this model, the authorargues that the CC of Telecommunications firm is a combination of 7factors, that is the basic management capacity, human resourcemanagement capability,, strategic management capability, marketingcapability, study and innovation capability, customer service capabilityand network operation and maintenance capability . Secondly, anevaluation index system, which consists of 7 first-class indexes and 46sub-class indexes, for telecommunications firms is constructed. Amulti-level fuzzy unanimous matrix model is established by applyingimproved AHP and expert grading method to determine the weight ofeach index in the evaluation system. Finally, an empirical study on corecompetence of China's telecommunications companies is conducted. Anevaluation of the result is also proposed.At the end of the thesis, two effective approaches for enhancing the corecompetence of telecommunications companies are recommended .One isthe external approach, which overcomes the external constraint factors offirms, the other is internal approach, which focuses more on theadjustments inside firms.The main contributions of the thesis are:Firstly, by combining the theory of core competence and the nature of thetelecommunications company, the thesis defines the connotation andnature of telecommunications companies' core competence and exploresthe core competence theory of Telecommunications Companies.Secondly, the thesis builds up a value chain model of telecommunicationsfirms and constructs an evaluation index system. The system includes7first-class indexes and 46 sub-class indexes, which provides an effectiveapproach to evaluate companies' core competence. Thirdly, the thesis constructs a multi-level fuzzy unanimous matrix modeland for the first time, conducts an empirical study to analyze the CC offour telecommunications companies in China.Finally, based on the quantitative analysis result on the core competenceof the four telecommunication companies in China, the thesis exploresand proposes some approaches for enhancing the Telecom Company'sCC.