Examining the role of export competitive advantages on export performance

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Accepted 14 January 2014 Available online February 27 2014 This paper investigates the role of export competitive advantage on export performance in food industry. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 280 randomly selected experts in food industry and Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.827. The study has applied factor analysis to find important factors influencing export performance. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity have been performed to validate the results and they both validated the questionnaire. The results of the survey have determined six effective groups including product development, e-commerce, marketing planning, organizational performance, competitiveness and supply chain management. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
During the past few years, many developing countries have boosted their economy by empowering their export activities such as China, South Korea, etc.However, there are normally various critical success factors for development of exports and there are many studies for finding important factors influencing exports (Hennig-Thurau, 2004;Singh & Koshy, 2011;Fuentes-Fuentes et al., 2011;Idris & Zairi, 2006;Ndubisi, 2012).Monreal-Pérez et al. (2012) investigated the impact of innovation on a firm's export activities while discussing potential endogeneity concerns and reported that innovation could induce companies to increase their export activities.Ross and Pike (1997) provided some evidence from Canadian industries on export credit risks and the trade credit offer and Serra et al. (2012) determined different organizational and managerial factors contributing to the propensity to export in a declining sector.They performed a survey on firms' resources and capabilities, as well as decision-makers' aims and subjective characteristics among Portuguese and UK firms in the textile and clothing industry and reported that, for Portugal, the size of firm and the educational level of managers were important key determinants of export propensity.As to the UK, age and perception of expenditures were the essential factors.Bloemer et al. (2012) explored the effects of trust, commitment, relation-oriented competencies as well as entrepreneurial competencies on export performance on exporting organizations located in the Netherlands.Aydemir and Gerni (2011) measured service quality of export credit agency in Turkey by using SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, 1990(Parasuraman, , 2000;;Parasuraman et al., 1994).Mah (2006) presented some evidences on the effect of export insurance subsidy on export supply from Japan.Ellis et al. (2011) stated that in exchange situations, the advantages of long-distance trade may outweigh the expenses of knowledge acquisition and reported some support for this proposition in their study by constructing a link between the export intensity of Chinese exporters and their acquisition of marketing know-how.They also showed some evidence that the marketing knowledge of transition economy firms maintained a positive effect on overall performance.Rienstra-Munnicha, and Turvey (2002) studied the relationship between exports, credit risk and credit guarantees in Canadian industries.Wang and Barrett (2002) gave a new empirical look at the longstanding question of the effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade flows by investigating the case of Taiwan's exports to the United States.Dewit (2001) performed a survey on the public provision of export insurance where the objective was insurance against the risk of default faced by firms exporting to risky markets, these insurance programs were often embedded in more global policy aims of the exporting country's government.The study tried to understand how premium rating of official export insurance was changed by strategic export promotion and the pursuit of other political objectives.Abraham and Dewit (2000) described that export promotion could not necessarily imply trade distortions and that most export destinations did not contribute from insurance premium subsidies.Kim et al. (2012) studied the relationships among various quality management (QM) practices and studied which QM practices directly or indirectly influence on five types of innovation including radical product, radical process, incremental product, incremental process, and administrative innovation.They reported that a set of QM practices through process management maintained a positive relationship with all of five types of innovation.Mokhtari et al. (2012) gave a decision support framework for risk management on sea ports and terminals based on fuzzy set theory and evidential reasoning approach.

The proposed study
This paper investigates the role of export competitive advantage on export performance in food industry.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the sample size, .000 As we can observe from the results of Table 1, KMO and approximated Chi-Square tests are within acceptable limits.Table 2 shows some basic statistics associated with the questionnaire of the survey.

Table 2
The results of some basic statistics Note that factor analysis is sensitive to skewness of the data and the results of Table 2 confirm that all data are within acceptable levels.Table 2 demonstrates the summary of communalities associated with the data.As we can observe from the results of our investigation, all data are well above 0.50, which validates the quality of the data.Table 3 shows details of total variance explained before rotation has been accomplished.In addition, Scree plot is used to extract efficient numbers of factors and the results are shown in Fig. 1 as follows, The results of Fig. 1 demonstrates that six factors plays essential role for the development of export in food industry and next section presents details of these components.

The results
In this section, we present details of factor analysis when rotation has been executed.Table 4 shows details of our findings.The results of Table 4 have determined six effective groups including product development, ecommerce, marketing planning, organizational performance, competitiveness and supply chain management.

Discussion and conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the impacts of different factors on development of export in food industry.The proposed study has determined six factors, which play essential role on development of export in food industry.The first factor, product development, consists of five factors including intangible resources, pricing strategy, advertising strategy, due to globalization and technical feasibility with the relative importance rate of 0.94.The second factor, ecommerce, consists of four factors including technical feasibility, internet Marketing, innovative technologies and customer contact channels with the relative importance rate of 0.89.The third factor, marketing planning, consists of four factors including market segmentation, the market share, type of industry, industry growth rate and investment rates in the industry with the relative importance rate of 0.88.The fourth factor, organizational performance, consists of suppliers of raw materials, strategic integration and international competitiveness with the relative importance rate of 0.86.Competitiveness is the next factor, which includes three factors including international competitiveness, customs tariff and international competitiveness with the relative importance rate of 0.85.Finally, supply chain is the last important factor, which includes three factors including management support, state support and outsourcing with the relative importance rate of 0.78.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The results of Scree plot and finally  is the error term.For our study we assume and e=0.05, the number of sample size is calculated as N=278.The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 280 randomly selected experts in food industry and Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.827.The study has applied factor analysis to find important factors influencing export performance.The proposed study of this paper uses factor analysis to group different factors influencing on export performance in food industry.Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity have been performed to validate the results are summarized in Table1as follow,  z p

Table 2
The summary of communalities

Table 3
The summary of total variance explained before rotation

Table 4
The summary of factor analysis after rotation has accomplished