Local firms versus MNCs in India : a study of competitive performance

Abstract

We studied the performance of 187 firms drawn from MNC subsidiaries (55), domestic private-owned (76), and domestic state-owned (56) firms operating in India. The underlying objective was to assess which group of firm demonstrated superior economic performance and competitiveness. We analyzed data for two periods of time 2002-03 and 2011-12 using four measures of economic performance namely operating profit margin (OPM), net profit margin (NPM), return on net worth (RONW) and asset turnover ratio (ATR). As the data set did not lend itself to parametric analysis, we adopted the nonparametric method. We employed Kruskal-Wallis H Test, Mann-Whitney U Test, Two-Step Cluster Analysis, and Chi-Square Test. We found that domestic private-owned firms performed better and were more competitive than the other two groups of firms.peer-reviewe