대기업의 동반성장활동이 중소기업의 경영성과에 미친 효과: 삼성전자 글로벌 강소기업 육성프로그램을 중심으로

The gap between large firms and small to medium sized firms (SMEs) has grown, raising economic imbalance and losing growth drivers, as well as creating social problems in South Korea. The government pushes large firms to support or cooperate with SMEs under the ‘Win-Win Growth’ policy. Under this policy, large firms can provide support to SMEs in several ways. Among these, Samsung Electronics launched the Global Hidden Champion Nurturing Program in 2011. Since its launch, Samsung Electronics has selected approximately ten promising suppliers every year and has provided continuous assistance, resulting in a total of 2.3 trillion KRW for 50 SMEs spent over five years. The program aims to nurture strong and competitive SMEs with a goal of raising their rank to at least fifth in the world, and second in the domestic market, in terms of market share. Through the nurturing program, Samsung Electronics provides aid in areas such as technology, manufacturing processes, human resources, education, and operation management. This program differs to the support of other large firms in that the basic viewpoint is not just distributing benefits from large firms to SMEs, but building an effective corporate ecosystem together. Samsung Electronics expects to innovate its products in collaboration with the high quality components of suppliers, leading to coevolution. The literature on cooperation between large firms and SMEs often sheds light on best practices of Win-Win Growth activities implemented by large firms and usually provides positive assessments (Yoo and Kim 2012; Rhee 2014, 2015; Kim 2014; Jeon and Roh 2013). However, prior literature is limited in that any economic effects on SMEs have not been discussed, even if SMEs are the focus point. Furthermore, assessments in the literature rely mainly on qualitative analysis with verbal data. In this study, we try to provide direct evidence regarding the effects of the Global Hidden Champion Nurturing Program on the business performance of supported SMEs using financial analysis. To analyze the nurturing program effect, we first set up a treated group of 37 selected suppliers of Samsung Electronics from 2011 and 2013. For a business performance comparison, we create a control group by choosing 98 SMEs that do not get aid from Samsung Electronics and that matched as closely as possible with the treated group in propensity-score matching. As we failed to find any matches with a firm of the treated group, the sample consists of 134 unique firms. We focus on two years, 2010 and 2014, as in the former year the nurturing program had not yet begun while the latter year is after all the treated group began to receive support. We collected the list of the 37 selected SMEs from a newspaper article, while financial data was obtained from DataGuide. To address the endogeneity of capability in supported SMEs and time-series effects, we use difference-in-difference analysis. We regress dependent variables on Treat (indicator variable that denotes the treated group), Post (dummy variable that represents the year of 2014), and Treat ×Post, their interaction term, including controls. We examine 11 dependent variables: (1) capital expenditures and R&D (research and development) expenditures, to test investment; (2) change in sales and domestic market shares, for growth analysis; (3) the operating margin, operating cash flows margin, net margin, return on assets, and return on equity, to investigate profitability; and (4) asset turnover and Tobin’s Q ratio. The empirical findings are summarized as follows. Firstly, the nurturing program has little effect on capital expenditures, however, positive effect was observed on R&D investment. Secondly, the program does not show any significant impact on the domestic market share, while it is negatively associated with sales growth. We note that the analysis on market share has a limitation in that the measure does not cover global market shares, whereas supported SMEs generate most of their sales in the global market. Moreover, the negative association between the nurturing program and stagnant sales growth of supported SMEs may be attributed to the fact that Samsung Electronics experienced a dramatic decrease in sales in 2014, resulting in the sales reduction of supported SMEs as suppliers to the giant customer. We hope they diversify their customer base and mitigate the possible dependency on Samsung Electronics in the future. Thirdly, the nurturing program shows positive effects on the operating margin and net margin, implying that the program worked for the improvement on supported SMEs’ business management. Finally, the nurturing program has little effect on asset turnover and Tobin’s Q. Taken together, aids by Samsung Electronics can lead SMEs to perform better through technology innovation, as well as management improvement. This paper contributes to the literature by providing evidence on the financial effects of the support of large firms on SMEs from the perspective of SMEs. We expect that Win-Win Growth activities create value for both SMEs and large firms, leading to an effective corporate ecosystem.