The Empirical Study On Industrial Structure Softening Of Multinational Corporation

With the acceleration of scientific globalization and shortening of the technology updating cycle, the objectives of the multinational corporations'global strategy gradually transfers from the effective cost to realization of learning abilities for innovation, while the strategic focus also transfers from the traditional market, resources and efficiency hunting to the global integration of strategic assets hunting. What accompanies and is connected with the global integration of the multinational corporations is the optimization and upgrade of the accelerating advancement of the world's industrial structure, that is the world's industry continuously evolves to the high value-added industry led by technology and knowledge, and the change of the world's industrial structure shows the features as follows:Information industry becomes the leading industry, the trend of industrial structure softening gets obvious and multinational corporations are the important factors.In the process of the world's industrial structure softening, a type of knowledge industry develops quickly, which is based on the knowledge production and reproduction and has information industry as its representative. Among that, knowledge and science service industries mainly composed by intelligence service and information processing with the representatives of the computer service and information consulting rise sharply, especially the information industry led by computer software develops swiftly. Thus it's the realistic cutting edge that we need to follow to study industrial structure softening. Therefore, there is real-time meaning for the thesis to choose IBM as the empirical objective. As the giant pioneer company of the global IT technology leader and service industrialization, IBM has transformed from the original hardware manufacturer leader to then advancing greatly in software market, and by now offering customers the soft solutions with technology and service linked, whose global strategy adjustment and industry upgrade and transition behave as the model of the industrial structure softening in multinational corporations, which clearly and intensively shows the classic evolvement of the multinational corporation's industrial structure. And the motives and rules for that are concluded in the paper as well.The thesis includes 5 chapters. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 elaborate the study background and meaning, review some related study and also give respective key conception and theoretical basis. Chapter 3 firstly analyzes the trend of multinational corporations'industrial structure softening, calculates their softening degree, and concludes the mode and motives of the industrial structure softening. Chapter 4 taking IBM as an empirical example, vividly shows the evolvement of the multinational corporations'industrial structure softening and excavates the rules of it from the micro-level. Chapter 5 is the closing of the whole thesis and makes some prospects to the current industrial structure mixed by globalization, information technology and service economy. And also it points out the inadequacy of the thesis and future study orientation of the author.