Building Company's Competitive Advantage Through Electronic Commerce

More and more companies have begun to adopt electronic commerce. Few companies, however, have made a profit. From the business strategy perspective, the poor performance is mainly caused by the failure to establish competitive advantage through electronic commerce. Based on Porter's competitive advantage theory, this dissertation tries to analyze how electronic commerce can affect the industry structure and transform the value chain and how a company can build its competitive advantage through electronic commerce. The thesis covers six chapters. In the first chapter of this work, the objective and the structure are briefly defined. The following chapter gives an overview of electronic business and Porter's competitive advantage theory, laying the theoretical base of the whole dissertation. The third chapter deals with a business value model of electronic commerce, answering the first question: How electronic commerce changes the industry structure and corporate value chains The fourth chapter is a case study of the publishing industry using the model developed in the previous chapters. The fifth chapter is the normative part of this work, developing a guiding methodology for corporation to build competitive advantage through electronic commerce. It is argued that the complementarities between the primary activities, between the business processes constituting each activity as well as between the business processes and the supporting technologies should be explored to build the competitive advantage. The sixth chapter serves as the conclusion of the whole thesis.