Empirical Research On Export Performance Of Manufacturers And Middlemen Relationship Strength

The growth of small enterprises needs enough resource, which comes from two main ways, one is the firm's internal resource, the other is gained through social networks. Because the firm's internal resource is limited, the owner's social networks come to be an important way to gain their needed resource. The depth and width of them usually decide the quantity and quality of resource the small enterprises get, then how they infect firm's performance arouse economists' attention.This paper studies the productive enterprise and middlemen's channel relationship strength's effect on export performance. The channel relationship strength dimensions include 5 factors, namely trust, relationship commitment, cooperation, flexibility and duration, export performance dimensions include financial and strategic export performance. We use structural equation modeling (SEM) and ANOVA analyse in this paper. The sample is fireworks productive enterprises which have export operations, and for the sake of the convenience of collecting sample, making the study be more pertinent, our sample is confined to the fireworks export productive enterprises in Liu Yang, which is the most famous area producing fireworks in China. It also enjoys a good fame in the world, this makes our study significative.After doing two-stage study, i.e. pilot study and large sample study, and testing the reliability and the validity of variables in this paper, a SEM about channel relationship strength and export performance is established and analyzed. We find that commitment and flexibility affect the financial export performance positively. Meanwhile we find that trust, cooperation, flexibility and duration affect the strategic export performance positively. We use ANOVA analyse study the effect of control variables on our study variables, the findings are: the capital amount has effect on firm's finacial and strategic export performance; the export way has effect on the trust, cooperation of channel relationship and strategic export performance; the export time has effect on trust, duration of channel relationship and strategic export performance.