Research On The Impact Of Product Market Competition On The Capital Structure Of China's E-commerce Companies

Nowadays,China's e-commerce industry has entered a mature stage of scale development,but the market competition is still very fierce,the phenomenon of seizing market share through competitive strategies such as "price war" emerges in endlessly,the backbone of e-commerce in China is still the market between companies.Whether e-commerce companies or not will adopt competitive strategies such as "price war" is influenced by their own competitiveness and the intensity of industry competition,and the operation of these strategies requires a lot of capital support,therefore,the capital structure of e-commerce companies is likely to be affected by product market competition.As for the research on the relationship between product market competition and capital structure,the relevant research results at home and abroad have been relatively rich,but few scholars have studied the relationship between them in the e-commerce industry,and few scholars have studied the influence of market competition on capital structure at the industry level and the company level at the same time.Based on the above background,this thesis integrates and selects e-commerce companies based on statistics of Wind,ruisi database,e-commerce listed company network and other data platforms for e-commerce companies as the sample companies of this study,and divides them into three different market structures according to the HHI index: competition group,low oligopoly group and high oligopoly group,taking 2014 as the base period and 2015-2017 as the sample period,and principal component analysis is used to integrate market share,expenditure intensity of sales expenses,pricing ability,financing ability,development and growth ability into product market competitiveness indicators that can represent the company level of e-commerce enterprises,and taking the reciprocal of the HHI index as an indicator of the intensity of product market competition at the industry level.This thesis innovatively uses HLM cross-level analysis model to study the impact of product market competition on the capital structure of e-commerce companies at the industry level and the company level.Empirical results of this thesis show that when industry characteristics and market structure are not considered:(1)The competitive variable at the corporate level has a negative effect on the total debt ratio and short-term debt ratio of e-commerce companies,and a positive effect on the long-term debt ratio;(2)The competition variable at the industry level can significantly promote the increase of total debt ratio and short-term debt ratio,and significantly reduce long-term debt ratio;(3)The industry competition variable negatively regulate the impact of the corporate competition variable on total liabilities and short-term liabilities,but they can not significantly regulate the impact of the corporate competition variable on long-term liabilities.When considering industry characteristics and market structure: In this thesis,three different markets show different effects.Generally speaking,the more competitive the market is,the more e-commerce companies tend to increase their total liabilities;The higher the degree of market monopoly,the less significant the effect of product market competition on capital structure;In a market environment with similar degree of competition and monopoly,e-commerce companies tend to adopt conservative financial strategies.