Chapter-5
 

Competing with Dragons and Tigers on the World Stage

During the last fifty years, Boeing Corporation has been the single largest exporter from the United States. The aircraft industry is important not only for its size but also for being one of the most technologically intensive, capital intensive, and scale intensive industries. The barriers to entry into this industry are extremely high – in fact higher than into other high tech sectors such as computing, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. It took the combined might of all of the rich European countries, over several decades, to create Airbus, the first viable competitor to Boeing.

Think now about which companies are likely to keep Boeing executives awake at night in another ten years. Clearly, Airbus will remain one of the major competitors. But Airbus is a devil they know and understand. What may really keep them awake is a company called Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (CACC), a state-owned enterprise from China created in May 2008 by merging the commercial aircraft operations of two other existing state-owned enterprises, AVIC 1 and AVIC 2. The Chinese government has publicly stated its goal to make China a competitor in the global jumbo jet market by 2020. CACC’s predecessor, AVIC 1, has already announced that it will be launching the maiden flight of ARJ21, a 70-100 seat passenger aircraft sometime during the next twelve months.

Consider now another industry that has been and continues to be crucial to the fortunes of virtually every major industrial economy – automobiles. At the January 2008 Detroit Auto Show, one of the most important auto shows in the world, the talk of the town was not General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Renault-Nissan, or Daimler but a “new” company from a “new” country – Tata Motors from India. Tata had just introduced the least expensive car in the world, the Nano, with a starting price of $2500. At the other end of the spectrum, within the same month, Tata Motors had also emerged as the front-runner to close a deal with Ford Motor Company to acquire Jaguar and Land Rover - two iconic, upscale, and highly global British brands.

CACC and Tata Motors represent just the tip of the iceberg in the global restructuring underway in several of the most important industries in the world. In this chapter on the rise of Chinese dragons and Indian tigers, we examine the strategy implications of these developments for established multinationals as well as the dragons and the tigers themselves. In more specific terms, we address questions such as the following: How similar or different is the rise of global champions from China and India today compared with that from Japan and South Korea during the 1970-2000 period? How globally fungible are the home-country advantages of today’s emerging market champions? What are the relative advantages/disadvantages of emerging global champions from China versus those from India? How serious a threat do the emerging global champions pose to incumbent MNCs from developed countries? What is the best strategy for established incumbents to neutralize the threat from emerging global champions? What weaknesses will the global champions from emerging markets need to overcome if they wish to survive as successful players on the global stage? And, how might they best overcome these weaknesses?