The Competition Strategy Of China's Insurance Company

With the door of Chinese insurance market being opened, Chinese insurers are facing the challenge of gaining a comprehensive understanding of the domestic and international market environments. The questions emerging include: Which forces lie beneath the competition in the industry? What actions opponents may adopt? How will the industry evolve? How do strategic decision-makers respond to competitive behaviours? And how can a company keep favourable standing during long-term competitions? In the era of pursuing Dual-wins or even Multi-wins, it's far from enough to seek competitive advantage only out of macro and industrial considerations. A company must compete on the basis of its own efforts and characteristics as well. Therefore, Chinese insurers must transfer from the models of 'big and complete' and 'small but complete' to Core Specialized Advantages. In the fields of non-core businesses, an insurer should cooperate fully with other participants and make full use of outer resources. Chinese insurers must pay attention to both the macro and micro aspects in order to secure its Highland in the daily fierce competition. Based on the above considerations, this thesis tries to achieve balance between its macro-levelled and micro-levelled analyses. Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, started the industrial strategic research. The publication of his three famous books—Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage, and Competitive Advantage of Nations—made Michael Porter the forerunner in the field of strategic research. Michael brought out the brilliant thoughts such as Five Forces, Three Basic Competitive Strategies, and Value Chain. With eras' changing and political and economical environments' evolving, corporate competition has taken a new form of Dual-Wins and Multi-Wins out of the old form of face-to-face battle. Cooperation, therefore, is becoming a prominent andstrategic topic. A new word Co-opetition, which is derived from two words of 'Competition' and 'Cooperation', has emerged in the dictionary of management, leading to a newly born theory of Co-opetition. In 1990, American scholar C. K. Prahalad and British scholar G. Hamel published their paper The Core Competence of the Corporation on Harvard Business Review, marking the birth of Core Competence Theory. It pushed the main corporate theories in the past decades to a new level, and became the most heated theory of corporate strategy. The theory of core competence emphasized not only on competition but also on cooperation (such as theory of outsourcing) and therefore it is naturally connected with the co-opetition theory. Based on the framework of co-opetition theory, the thesis tries to analyse the competitive and cooperative strategies for Chinese insurance companies with core competition concept being applied throughout the analysing process. This thesis is composed of preface and four chapters as organised as follows:Chapter One explains the evolution of competition, which provides a platform for the further research in the later chapters. Cooperative competition, the starting point of the whole work, is the advanced phrase during the competition evolving process. This chapter is divided into three sections of Antagonistic Competition, Tolerant Competition and Cooperative Competition. Each of them respectively represents a phrase during the evolution of competition. The chapter briefly explains the characteristics, reasons of emerging and process of evolution of the three competition shapes. Section One is about antagonistic competition. In the earlier period of market evolvement, the room for labour distribution is very limited. The simple distribution of labours leads to high-levelled similarity among the products of various producers. One product in the market can be easily substituted by others without damaging the chain of labour distribution of the whole society. The corporations are antagonistic against each other and easily attacked bytheir competitors. Price is the most common way used to compete...