Can First-mover Advantage In The Strategic Emerging Industries Be Sustained?

Under the background of China’s increasing economic downward pressure, fostering and developing strategic emerging industries is an important way to transform the economic development mode and upgrading of industrial structure. At present, the development of strategic emerging industries have achieved certain results, in the same time, some problems were gradually exposed, from research perspective, to crack these issues should be in depth understanding of industrial development on the basis of the basic facts, exploring the unique characteristics of industrial development, mechanism and laws. This paper selected enterprise’s first-mover advantage in the strategic emerging industry for the research perspective, focused on whether the advantage due to first mover companies acquired exists, or can be sustained. While further exploring differences affect factors about first-mover’s sustained competitive advantage and different sectors of the influencing factors. Researches on this issue help to understand the particularity and the impact of enterprises to enter the strategic emerging industries, make some theoretical interpretation about blind investment, follow the trend of investment, leader fading and other practical problems, also provides a reference for the government to formulate relevant industrial policies.Firstly, on the basis of domestic and foreign research about competitive advantage of enter order, combined with the analysis of current situation about China’s strategic emerging industry characteristics, the law of development and the entry timing of company in the strategic emerging industries, build a theoretical model of competitive advantage on enter order of company, select related data from 2000 to 2013 about public companies in seven sectors of strategic emerging industry, describe the basic facts of first-mover companies, make empirical test about hypotheses and models, draw empirical results about market performance, change trends over time, impact of factors and differences between industries of first-mover advantage in strategic emerging industries. This research have shown that company’s first-mover advantage in strategic emerging industries is mainly reflected in terms of market share advantage, meanwhile higher debt ratio, efficient productivity and larger firm size have a positive effect on the market share advantage of the first entrants. But in the longer period first-mover advantage in the strategic emerging industry can not be sustained, even gradually weakened to reverse. There are three aspects to explain this phenomenon:"tide phenomenon" in strategic emerging industries, resulting in industry profit margins decline; short term profit driven behavior of enterprises; intellectual property protection system is not perfect, resulting in the first innovations into the enterprise easy to imitate, weakened first-mover advantage. The empirical tests of COX risk models for influence factor about sustainability of first-mover advantage found that relatively low profit levels, loose financing conditions, higher growth rate of the industry contribute to company to maintain sustainability of first-mover advantage. Finally, introduce virtual variable about high and low access industry intend to further research impact factor differences of sustainability of first-mover advantage, the results showed that sustainability of first-mover advantage in high access industry performance is weaker, while relatively low profit levels, loose financing conditions, higher growth rate of the industry contribute to company to maintain sustainability of first-mover advantage. Overall, therefore sustainability of first-mover advantage will be affected by the characteristics of firm and industry, while relatively low profit levels and loose financing conditions contribute to company to maintain first-mover advantage, the rapid growth of the industry help company to maintain first-mover advantage, protect of industry entry barriers against sustainability of first-mover advantage.Based on the above findings, this paper considers the development of strategic emerging industries have their own unique characteristics and growth pattern of property, at the same time affected by external market environment and company’s own factors. Therefore, the government needs to formulate relevant policies and measures in accordance with the law of the intrinsic properties and growth of strategic emerging industries, the development of strategic emerging industries to reduce encountered risks through continuous policy guidance, resource commitment, organization and coordination measures to strengthen core competencies of strategic emerging industries, promote stable and rapid development of strategic emerging industries, boosting the country’s economic restructuring. This paper propose the following three suggestions:improve entry criteria and exit mechanisms of strategic emerging industries, promote the rational distribution of industry; raise the relevance of strategic emerging industries and strengthen the implementation of policies, guide entry firm to make rational construction investment decision; attach great importance to intellectual property rights protection and innovation strategy, cultivate long term core competitiveness of strategic emerging industries.The main innovation of this paper is the extension for the static comparison of first-mover advantage to the long-term dynamic comparison, and the use of COX risk factors model to research influence factors of long-term trends about first-mover advantage, as well as compare influence factors of long-term trends about first-mover advantage between different industries of high and low access, establishing a more complete entry order and enterprise performance analysis framework.