How the key factors affect value creation for Market Intelligence processes for companies in China

China is a unique market that differs from the Western market in many ways. Companies are not required to publicize financial reports, and furthermore a heavy focus on business relationship building can make it hard for companies to have high quality streams of data to get insights about their markets. For a consultant company to successfully enter the Chinese market and helping producing and technological global firms improving their insights on the Chinese market, the consultant company needs to understand which the important factors are and how those factors can help in creating value for their potential customers. To help the analyzing and consultant firm called Kairos Future, a qualitative case study was conducted on 16 different global companies with focus on industrial production. The case study was mainly conducted through face to face interviews with decision makers who had a broad understanding of their respective companies. In order to find where value can be created, the study was first used to find out which level of autonomity the China part of the global firm hadand how it affects the value creation linked to Market Intelligence, meaning receiving market data and analyzing it in order to get powerful market insights. The study also focused on the level of dependancy on having a continuous stream of technological information from external sources, how the companies are finding other types of market data and how they are analyzing and getting insights from the data. The final part of the study was to understand the level ofmaturity of the Chinese market linked to Market Intelligence, and what aspects affect the value creation for the customers. The report´s findings show that it is important for a consultant firm to focus on customers with high level of autonomity, or the head quarter in those cases where the level of autonomity is low - this in order to best utilize the consultant firm´s resources.Even though the companies in the study were heavily focused on the technological know-how within their respective markets, this was the one aspect they found the least interest in receiving external help with from a consultat firm. Receiving insights about customers within existing and new market segments was instead valued much higher. To understand the competitors’ movements in the market was also of high interest, because of the difficulty of finding public data within a given market in China. In order to successfully enter the Chinese Market Intelligence market, a consultant firm like Kairos Future needs to choose the specific customer segments where they can contribute the most value though their product and service offering. The goal should be to focus on one segment at a time, getting satisfied customers that help Kairos Future get a good market reputation through the word-of-mouth effect, and thereby making future sales easier. When this is accomplished, the same strategy can be applied to a new customer segment