Catch up strategies of Asian firms : a micro-level perspective

In this paper we study a case-study of Haier Corporation of China in order to illustrate how successful companies in China have been able to catch up technologically with western countries and Japan. In spite of the common opinion in the managerial and academic literature, in which China is often noted as a low cost production country, we show that there is evidence that a number of companies are catching up technologically as well. Some of them are even threatening the competitive technological position of dominant companies in the US, Europe and Japan. In this paper we analyze a typical example of such a successful Chinese company; The Haier Group