진입이전 자원이 신규사업의 경쟁전략과 기업성과에 미치는 영향에 대한 연구

Entry into a new business through diversification, spin-off, or a new venture has been studied for a long time. In each case, transfer of parent firms’ resource and capability is considered an important factor in its success. Nine out of top ten Korean general Internet shopping malls (as opposed to specialized malls) have parent firms in retail business. Virtually all of these nine firms’ parents are who’s who of Korean large enterprises. But, they have been showing rather consistent performance discrepancies. Hence, we ask the following questions: What determines the performance of Internet shopping malls? Do pre-entry resources possessed by the parents play an important role? Can off-line-based knowledge be applied to e-business? Drawing upon the resource-based view of business entry and the concept of generic competitive strategy, we argue that specific types of pre-entry resource enable the use of certain competitive strategies, which, in turn, determine performance of the Internet shopping malls. Accumulation of relevant industry experience and resource – called pre-entry resource – is one of the major success factors in a new business entry. More critical is the fit between the resource possessed by a firm and the resource demanded by a new business. Pre-entry resource and its fit with a target business should play an equally important role on- and off-line. As of 2003, there were over three thousand Internet shopping malls in Korea. Among them, top ten firms explain over 70% of total traffic. We studied these dominant players. Since this study is interested in those with parent firms, one pure play firm was excluded. Case study approach was employed based on semi-structured interviews augmented by a survey and secondary data sources. Interview questions were composed based on preliminary research using information from each firm’s homepage, internal material obtained through formal requests, and other secondary data. We interviewed people familiar with history and the business of each firm. Questions were asked regarding type of competitive strategy and transferable resources between the parent firms and the Internet shopping malls. Reliable traditional performance measures are not yet available in this industry. As a result, we used the traffic data – ranking of monthly traffic for a three year period – provided by a website research and analysis firm. The importance of resource leverage and transfer appears the same on- or off-line. As suggested in the propositions, the resource –strategy – performance relationship does seem to be influenced by what the parent’s prior business was (i.e., department store, catalog retailer, or TV home shopping). In the Internet shopping mall business, generalized resource includes capital and expenditure sharing such as advertising, general human resource, overall brand names and corporate reputation. Profile of customers, resulting profile of products, increased bargaining power and economies of scale coming from shared sourcing of products, distribution channel and logistics sharing, corporate reputation in retailing are example of specialized resource. As suggested in Proposition 1, home shopping based Internet malls showed higher performance than department store based Internet malls. Department stores, seemingly identical business with Internet shopping malls, could not leverage resources other than generalized ones. However, an unexpected result was that catalog retailer based Internet malls showed the lowest performance. We initially considered catalog retailing closer than department store to Internet shopping mall due to its store-less retailing experience, thus offering more specialized resources than department stores. However, It turned out that those catalog retailer-turned-into-Internet mall firms had few specialized resources to leverage, except for the experience in store-less retailing. Products were different, thus wiping out the possibility of any synergy. Although customers were overlapped, the customer base of catalog retailers was too small – between 20,000 and 50,000 – to be leveraged. The only resource that could be shared was the logistics. These firms’ parents are well-known names. But, they had a mediocre level of reputation in retailing at best, unlike the parent firms in home shopping and department store businesses. Those firms suffered from weak or low quality resource profile. Sample firms’ strategies were dichotomized into two types: integrated strategy and stuck-in-the-middle. Firms using the integrated strategy showed consistently higher performance, supporting Proposition 2. Interestingly, all the firms employing integrated strategy were home shopping based Internet malls, thus partially supporting Proposition 3. What is important is not an absolute amount of resources, but whether the firm possesses specialized resources of high quality demanded by a specific business. Those resources seem to help firms overcome the order of entry effect in that the late entrants with TV home shopping experience rapidly became top performers. Finally, in e-business, cost leadership is a prerequisite and differentiation a must, thus making integrated strategy the most viable competitive strategy.