An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Strategic Uniqueness Of Listed Companies And Corporate Performance

Since the dawn of the research on it in the1970’s, the Strategic Management theory has been developed and enriched into a subject with a wide coverage, thanks to the work of many researchers. The Strategic Management theory is derived into a few branches, including the Industrial Organization theory, the Resource-based View, the Theory of Core Capability of Enterprise, the Knowledge-Based Theory, the Dynamic Capability Theory, etc. Meanwhile, the importance of Strategic management to the enterprise development has drawn an increasing attention from the industry. A unique strategy may distinguish a corporation from its competitors, resulting in sustainable advantage in the competition which cannot be easily mimicked by others.Based on this, in this paper, we apply the macroscopic Strategic Management theory into the microscopic accounting research. By constructing a delegate variable which represents the uniqueness of the strategy, we conduct regression analysis on the data of the A-shares in China stock market at a large scale, in order to determine whether adopting unique strategies can enhance the profitability of the listed companies, as well as the sustainability of the influence by the strategies. Further, we study the impact of other factors on this correlation, including the development level of the market, the industry characteristics, and the type of the effective controller.In this paper, we use all the listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share stock market as samples. By analyzing the regression result of8881sets of firm-year samples, we find that the uniqueness of corporative strategy has a significant positive correlation with both short-term performance and long-term performance. Meanwhile, the samples are divided into subgroups for comparison, based on the development level of the market, the industry characteristics, or the type of the effective controller, respectively. The results show that, the enhancement on the performance by unique strategy is relatively higher for the companies in developed markets, in non-regulated industries, and in the actual control of state-owned enterprises. Yet the difference is not statistically of high significance. We also examine the relationship between strategic uniqueness and long-term corporative performance, and find that compared to those in non-regulated industries, companies in regulated industries benefit dramatically more from using a unique strategy in long term. The result of this study provides empirical support for the Strategic Management theory. It also enriches the accounting research literature on the performance of companies, and provides some insights for the strategic decisions of China’s listed companies.