METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING THE COMPETITIVENESS OF AUTOMOTIVE COMPANIES IN THE CONTEXT OF BUILDING THE GOVERNMENT STRATEGY FOR AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

An important part of domestic machine-building sector is the automotive industry represented mainly by car, truck and bus manufacturing. It is hardly a secret nowadays that the Ukrainian automotive industry is facing tough times, thus failing to withstand strong competition from foreign car manufacturers. In this context, as never before, the issue to enhance the government support of domestic automakers is of a critical importance. It is expected that the implementation of government strategy for automotive industry development will have different effects at discrete automotive companies subject to their different competitiveness level. Hence, there is a need to conduct a research on developing a methodological toolkit for the automotive company competitiveness evaluation. The research objective is to construct a methodological framework to assess automotive manufacturers’ competitiveness in the context of building the government strategy to enhance the automotive industry development. The study has employed the following methods: a monographic method and the method of theoretical generalization to identify the most widely used methodological approaches to company competitiveness assessment; a method of analysis and synthesis for elaborating a methodology to assess the automotive industry competitiveness in the context of building the government strategy for automotive industry development. Based on the combination of integral and matrix approaches, an evaluation framework to estimate the automotive company competitiveness has been designed. The method suggested, in contrast to other techniques described in academic literature, allows for the identification of car manufacturers competitiveness by integral indices values along with revealing the stages of their life cycle. The synthesis of the results of automakers competitiveness estimation and identification of the stages in their life cycle laid the foundation for the construction of the automotive industry development matrix which in turn is the basis for tailoring of government strategy to enhance the automotive industry development. Working out a set of methodological tools to evaluate the competitiveness of the automotive industry contributes to further development of methodical framework of government regulation in terms of facilitating the automotive industry competitiveness towards its focus differentiation, thus increasing the managerial effectiveness.