Study On The Relationship Of Specific Investment, International Knowledge Spillover And OEMS’ Independent Brand Ability Building

The constructing of the Global Value Chain is regarded as a rare opportunity for the development of manufacturing enterprises from those developing countries. By undertaking multinational corporations’ outsourcing businesses, plenty of Chinese OEMs have made a great progress. With the advantage of the cheap labor and raw materials, China is honoured as the world’s factory. However, as the transformation of the economic situations and the saturation of the OEM business, the limitation of the development patterns is emerging. OEMs get no way to save and divert funds into research and development result of the low additional value. What’s worse, the survival of the OEMs is challenging by the problems of rocketing cost of Chinese factors and the backflow of transnational corporations to native countries. OEMs should change their philosophy of management and establish the concept of building competitive superiority by knowledge acquiring. As to Chinese OEMs, the limits of internal resources can hardly meet the diverse need on knowledge. Then how to make a full use of OEM relationship and knowledge spillover from their customers to achieve the goal of upgrading has become a popular topic for the academia. The resource-based theory considers that a company’s performance stems from the resources. As to OEMs, the most essential and original resource is the specific resource which related to certain customers. The research on the impact of specific investments on OEMs’performance in virtue of their customers has gained lots of attentions in academia. Considering the importance of specific resources, this article will use specific investment as a breakthrough point, and lucubrate the effects of different kinds of specific investments to the OEMs’ independent brand strategy and the mediating role played by the international knowledge spillover, in order to provide some useful advice for OEMs’ operating decisions and help OEMs get rid of developing dilemma.This article will firstly arrange related literatures on specific investment, international knowledge spillover and OEMs’independent brand strategy to clarify their definitions and relationship. Then in order to solve the basic question that how to use specific investments to influence the customers and improve OEMs’performance, the article establishes the relationship model of specific investment, international knowledge spillover and OEMs’ independent brand strategy, and then put forward several hypotheses about their relationships. In order to make a further study on the mechanism of the specific investments’ influence, this article chooses OEMs from Zhejiang Province as the objects of the empirical research, and explores four closely related questions:effects of different kinds of specific investments to OEMs’ independent brand strategy; effects of different kinds of specific investments to international knowledge spillover; effects of international knowledge spillover to OEMs’ independent brand strategy; and what kind of a role that international knowledge spillover plays in the process of the influence of the specific investment to the OEMs’independent brand strategy. In order to answer these four questions, the author takes the method of questionnaire survey, gains181effective samples. The conclusions are as follows:(1) As the three dimensions of specific investment, substance-based, process-based and capacity-based specific investment all have a positive influence on the OEMs’independent brand strategy.(2) Different dimensions of specific investment have a different impact on the international knowledge spillover. In this regard, specific investment of substance has a positive influence on the explicit-knowledge spillover, and specific investment of capacity has a positive influence on the tacit-knowledge spillover, and specific investment of process influences both explicit and tacit knowledge spillover.(3) Both two dimensions of the specific investment have a positive influence on the OEMs’ independent brand strategy.(4) Explicit-knowledge spillover plays a significant intermediary effect when substance-based and process-based specific investment have an influence on the OEMs’ independent brand strategy, while tacit-knowledge spillover plays a role of intermediary when process-based and capacity-based specific investment impacting the OEMs’ independent brand strategy. In the end, the article gives the conclusions of the whole research, puts forward some suggestions for OEMs’operations and points out some deficiencies and expectations for future research.