Competition Strategy Of China United Telecommunications Corporation - The Chinese Telecommunications Market Competition Pattern Analysis,

At the turn of a new century, we are standing at the edge of the information revolution, which will lead to worldwide changes. Challenges, uncertainties and opportunities are bound to follow these changes. Even though these opportunities are still in the bud, corporations all over the world have begun their competitive campaigns to seize these opportunities. The corporations that take the appropriate competitive strategies will win the competition, a competition for the future. In such an uncertain environment, there are many unprecedented opportunities and challenges for the existence and development of an organization, especially enterprises. How to avoid risks, how to grasp the opportunities and how to build up competitive advantages are key factors for the success of enterprises. Therefore, it is not surprising that strategic management has become the main work for high-level executives in a company. Managing in a turbulent environment, managers have to have the great ability of decision-making, especially the ability to choose appropriate strategies for enterprises in an environment full of uncertainty. When high-level executives make their strategic decision for a company, what kind of analysis do they have to carry out? And what factors should they pay attention to? By means of newly developed frameworks and tools for strategic analysis in Europe and U.S.A, such as Internal Factor Evaluation (IFE) Matrix, External Factor Evaluation (EFE) Matrix, SWOT analysis, Five Forces Analysis and Industry Scenario Analysis, etc., this paper tries to analyze the competitive strategies adopted by China United Telecommunications Corporation (hereinafter referred as China Unicom). At present, research emphasis is put on theoretical competitive strategies in China. There is a lack of literature on systematic practices of analyzing competitive strategies. This is exactly the reason that I choose this subject for my dissertation. Why did I choose China Unicom as the analytical object? There are two reasons: one is that the telecom industry is developing rapidly and changing our life and work styles. The other is that I had the pleasure to do my work placement in British Telecom (BT) from August to October of 1999, which provided me an excellent opportunity to learn how BT carried out its competitive strategy analysis. By using BT's experience as a reference, this paper discusses competitive strategy analysis for China Unicom. There are five chapters in this paper. The general overview of the Chinese telecom market is given in Chapter 1, which is the basis for further analysis. In Chapter 2, the paper discusses the Chinese telecom industry and competitive environment. The Five Forces Model of the Chinese telecom market is also presented in this chapter. Chapter 3 discusses competitive abilities, resources, strengths and weaknesses of China Unicom in detail. Chapter 4 presents how to formulate and choose competitive strategies for China Unicom in an uncertain environment. The Industry Scenario Method is used in this chapter. Last, but not the least, choices of competitive strategies for China Unicom's basic telecom services, mobile telecommunications services and value-added telecom services are given respectively in Chapter 5.