Competitive strategy for Taiwanese Manufacturers Facing Transition in Thermoset Polyimide Suppliers' Market
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Yang, Chun-E
Abstract
Polyimide was firstly invented by DuPont in the 1960s and now plays an important role in manufacturing. Its semi-manufactures and products are widely employed by different industries, such as vehicles, aerospace and electronics. In Taiwan, there is no company having ability to produce polyimide materials. Hence, these materials are supplied by specific foreign chemical companies via Taiwanese agents. There are totally six suppliers, i.e. DuPont, Ensinger, EVONIK, Saint-Gobain, VTEC and Daelim. Since there are a few material suppliers, it is hard for both Taiwanese agents and manufacturers acquiring polyimide materials. Based on aforementioned description, this thesis establishes suppliers’ and agents’ competitive profiles and provides corresponding competitive strategies for a potential agent to overcome these barriers. From the established suppliers’ profiles, only DuPont and EVONIK have sufficient product lines and provide customized service for clients. Others only sell their standard semi-manufactured products. It is worth noticing that, even though DuPont sells several products, for quality control, DuPont only provides rods and sheets of polyimide instead of powder. However, in order to promote company’s polyimide, EVONIK sells polyimide powder for manufactures processing. Furthermore, EVONIK is willing to customize products for specific usage to extend products to the industries. Based on the information from the profiles, all measures indicate that EVONIK will be highly competitive in the polyimide market. Moreover, EVONIK does not have an authorized agent yet. Therefore, the potential agents should endeavor to get the authorization from EVONIK. When further establishing Taiwanese agents’ competitive profiles, this thesis found that all agents now only sell materials but not provide processing and manufacturing service. Hence, these agents do not realize needs from the industries and could not provide appropriate solutions. Providing proper solutions, processing and manufacturing polyimide product to the industries could be a competitive strategy for the potential agent to open polyimide market in Taiwan. Furthermore, filing patents for processing methods and machines could help the potential agents expand the market share.
Subjects
polyimide
competitive analysis
strategy analysis
Type
thesis