Strategic action in network industries: an empirical analysis of the European mobile, страница 9

move taken by a firm with an objective to maintain its position, alter the competitive balance, or improve its competitive position. News items that merely reflected intentions, or other information lacking any direct parallel in the firms’ activities, were disregarded. For example, ‘‘Operator X is planning toy’’ was not considered an action, as it was just a statement of intentions. However, ‘‘to expand operations, Operator X announces a comprehensive marketing program’’ was regarded as a move as it reflects a definite action in the market. Similarly, the announcing of financial results, subscriber numbers or market shares was not considered to be a move, since it is merely a statement of facts without direct repercussions in the firm’s activities or its competitive behavior in the market. Thus, the defining characteristic of a strategic action is its close association with the activities taken by a firm to build its actual competitive position in the market.

To be included in the sample, firms’ actions had to pertain specifically to the mobile telecom sector, and to be initiated either by the mobile phone operator itself or by its parent company. For example, the ‘‘restructuring of Telefonica’’ was not considered a move, as it was not clear whether or not mobile operations were involved. In contrast, British Telecom formed several joint ventures in the mobile telecom sector during the period under study. These moves were attributed to its mobile telecom subsidiary, Cellnet, and to the other operators in the sample that shared the decision to reconfigure their own activities and to become a part of a joint venture. Thus, collaborative moves taken by several operators were credited to each of the firms involved, e.g., a strategic alliance between Telecom Eireann, Telia and KPN was coded as three strategic actions taken by the operators involved. However, picking up a stake in other mobile operators was considered to be a move only for the acquiring firm that makes the strategic decision. In such cases, any further restructuring of operations is later regarded as a new action. Similarly, privatization was not regarded as a move since the decision to sell its share in the stock market is made not by the firm itself, but by the key shareholder (i.e., the government), nor is the decision of direct relevance for the mobile operations. Following this procedure identified a total of 199 strategic actions. These actions were grouped together to form categories based on similar keywords. For example, phrases like ‘‘ad campaign’’, ‘‘marketing promotions’’ and ‘‘displays in major airports’’ were grouped in the ‘‘marketing campaign’’ category. This grouping yielded 25 categories, which were further condensed into actions relating to the three primary activities typical of the network configuration: infrastructure operations, promotion and contract management, and service provisioning. Further, these 199 actions were categorized into two groups: competitive or cooperative. The main problem about identifying cooperative actions is that any given action may be cooperative with regard to some players in the industry, but competitive for others. In order to follow a reasonable and unambiguous rule, we regarded an action as ‘‘cooperative’’ if it involved any type of cooperation with at least one other network firm, such as other phone operators or other mediators acting in cooperation with the operator as part of vertical layering. Table 1 provides further examples of how the strategic actions were categorized.

To check the reliability of the identification and categorization of strategic actions, a second person used the same procedure to do the coding. The test was performed on 5 issues of the ECN newsletter out of the 34 issues on which the sample is based (17 months2 issues per month). There were some minor differences in the number of actions identified and the period in which they were accounted for, but none in their categorization regarding either the type or the nature of the actions. In contrast to the 25 actions initially identified by the first coder, the second one found only 20 actions on which both coders fully agreed in their classification. The divergence