Competitor or what?
When I was a student and learned about competition I thought that competing companies are really enemies and would do anything to make the other company disappear. But working with MNCs and having visibility of the transactions of a big pool of global companies I realized that competition is fairly relative.
There are so many areas where competing companies cooperate, competing companies are suppliers for each other or provide services. It is somehow weird because every business one company would give to its competition basically it boosts the share price of the other company. And when share price is the ultimate goal of a CEOs agenda, then it is somehow in contrast with these “giving revenue to the competition” actions..
If you look at the advertising and the promotions, then yes, companies compete on one level: to get customers. However companies do not really compete in the process of delivering the goods and services for customers (they would cooperate with the competition just to satisfy the client). The persons deciding these have to be really with an objective mind and be able to balance between building strategies to kick the competition on one hand and on the other hand to cooperate in offering new products and services.
One example: a lot of mobile phones use chips from Samsung and competing with the Samsung phones on the market. I can’t really tell more concrete examples without publishing confidential information unfortunately, but if you are interesting in this topic, then you can surely get some facts and figures from the newspapers as well (like the Samsung one).
The same thing you can see in politics. Politicians have lots of speeches about how bad the other party is and how they want to make them disappear from the political scene, but in reality they have common businesses and they negotiate behind the back door dirty stuff.
I don’t really like this duality as I am mostly very passionate about what I do and therefore I always put my heart in one thing (be it personal life or work). I mostly like black and white decisions in issues regarding principles (like working with the competition or not). Of course being in the same business, you would cooperate at some level to represent the interests of the industry, but that does not mean that you generate revenue for the competitors. If this happens, it means that the area is too consolidated and there are just few players. Which is not good; it means that there is a small step to control the prices and that’s what hurts me…. and all the consumers.
Of course the issue is more complex then how I have described (I tried to make it a simplistic scenario), but my conclusion is that the concept of competition has to be re-defined from the consumer’s point of view. I guess this is one of the effects of a globalized world. Is it good or not? Time will tell.
There are so many areas where competing companies cooperate, competing companies are suppliers for each other or provide services. It is somehow weird because every business one company would give to its competition basically it boosts the share price of the other company. And when share price is the ultimate goal of a CEOs agenda, then it is somehow in contrast with these “giving revenue to the competition” actions..
If you look at the advertising and the promotions, then yes, companies compete on one level: to get customers. However companies do not really compete in the process of delivering the goods and services for customers (they would cooperate with the competition just to satisfy the client). The persons deciding these have to be really with an objective mind and be able to balance between building strategies to kick the competition on one hand and on the other hand to cooperate in offering new products and services.
One example: a lot of mobile phones use chips from Samsung and competing with the Samsung phones on the market. I can’t really tell more concrete examples without publishing confidential information unfortunately, but if you are interesting in this topic, then you can surely get some facts and figures from the newspapers as well (like the Samsung one).
The same thing you can see in politics. Politicians have lots of speeches about how bad the other party is and how they want to make them disappear from the political scene, but in reality they have common businesses and they negotiate behind the back door dirty stuff.
I don’t really like this duality as I am mostly very passionate about what I do and therefore I always put my heart in one thing (be it personal life or work). I mostly like black and white decisions in issues regarding principles (like working with the competition or not). Of course being in the same business, you would cooperate at some level to represent the interests of the industry, but that does not mean that you generate revenue for the competitors. If this happens, it means that the area is too consolidated and there are just few players. Which is not good; it means that there is a small step to control the prices and that’s what hurts me…. and all the consumers.
Of course the issue is more complex then how I have described (I tried to make it a simplistic scenario), but my conclusion is that the concept of competition has to be re-defined from the consumer’s point of view. I guess this is one of the effects of a globalized world. Is it good or not? Time will tell.
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