Customer Concentration,Cash Flow Uncertainty And Enterprise Innovation Investment

Innovation is the fundamental force to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises and promote their continuous development.Sufficient investment in R&D is of great significance to enterprises.However,new technologies,the new products and services,which are the results of enterprise innovation,only when they are purchased or used by customers can they truly realize their value and thus make profits for the enterprise.In this way,external capital can flow in for the daily operation and sustainable development of the enterprise.Customers are important stakeholders in the downstream of enterprises,and the relationship between enterprises and customers has been paid more and more attention by the outside world and other stakeholders.Among them,the degree of customer concentration is an aspect of the supply chain structure,which is the main index to measure the enterprise-customer relationship network.The index of high customer concentration represents that the business income of an enterprise mainly comes from one or a few customer enterprises.The more single the enterprise's customers,the stronger the enterprise's dependence on customers.At the same time,Chinese regulators are also aware of the need for enterprises to disclose such information and have revised,supplemented and refined the disclosure of customer information in relevant standards for many times.Existing studies have shown that customer concentration will have an impact on the business activities and decisions of enterprises.As a strategic decision of enterprises,is innovation investment influenced by customer concentration?How does customer concentration affect the innovation investment level of enterprises?This is exactly the problem of this paper.This paper selects listed A-share high-tech manufacturing companies from 2013 to 2018 as samples to study the impact of customer concentration on innovation investment of enterprises and the mediating role of cash flow uncertainty between the two.The empirical results show that:(1)The customer concentration is negatively correlated with the innovation input of enterprises,that is,the higher customer concentration inhibits the innovation input level of enterprises.(2)Introducing cash flow uncertainty as an intermediary variable,the results show that customer concentration is positively correlated with cash flow uncertainty,that is,customer concentration increases the cash flow uncertainty of enterprises.Moreover,the uncertainty of cash flow plays a part of intermediary role between customer concentration and innovation input of enterprises,that is,customer concentration leads to higher uncertainty of cash flow,which negatively affects the level of innovation input of enterprises.(3)Further,considering the moderating effect of heterogeneity factors(enterprise bargaining power,the nature of property rights,the enterprise scale and degree of regional marketization),it is found that the negative correlation between customer concentration and innovation investment is more significant in the enterprises with weak bargaining power and private nature than in the enterprises with strong bargaining power and state-owned nature;the moderating effect of enterprise scale is not significant;the high degree of marketization in the region where the enterprises are located can reduce the negative correlation between the two.(4)Procurement is an extremely important link in the operation of enterprises,and the transaction between suppliers and enterprises will also have an impact on the operating cash flow of enterprises.Therefore,under different supplier concentration,the relationship between customer concentration and enterprise innovation input may be different.Furthermore,according to the grouping regression of upstream supplier enterprise concentration,it is found that the higher the supplier concentration is,the more significant the negative correlation between customer concentration and enterprise innovation input is.