FIRM FACTORS AFFECTING PROFIT MARGINS IN THE EUROPEAN AQUACULTURE INDUSTRY: ANALYSIS OF THE PERIOD 2009-2013  

José L. Fernández Sánchez*, José M. Fernández Polanco, Ladislao Luna Sotorrío, and Ignacio Llorente García
 
* IDES research group. Department of Business Administration. University of Cantabria. Avda. de los Castros s/n, 39005 Santander (Spain). E-mail: fernandezjl@unican.es.

Introduction

Identification of the sources of variation in firm performance is a recurrent theme in applied business research. Two main theoretical explanations have heavily influenced the answer to the question of economic performance differences among firms in the strategic management literature: industrial organization (I/O) economics and the resource-based view (RBV). Whilst the I/O economics view theorizes that performance variation of firms should be attributed to the structural characteristics of the industrial sectors in which they operate, the other stream, RBV, explains performance differences between firms with a focus upon internal or firm-specific factors (Kamasak, 2011). The aim of this work is to analyze how some firm-specific factors can explain differences in economic performance of firms belonging to the European aquaculture industry.

Methodology

European firms (EU28+Norway) which main activity belongs to the marine and continental fish farming (NACE 0321 and 0322 respectively) were identified in the AMADEUS (total) database and annual economic data of those companies was collected for the period 2009-2013. The economic variables of performance analyzed in this research are firms' gross and net margins. Firm-specific factors analyzed were size (measured by turnover), development strategy and product certification strategy. Bivariate analysis using non-parametric tests to test differences in means among different groups of firms.

Results

Table 1 shows that firms' size is a variable that is positively related with economic performance in the case of marine aquaculture. In addition, Table 3 shows that product certification is also positively related with firms' economic performance in the case of marine aquaculture. Finally, results in Table 2 have not been as conclusive as the other results even though diversification strategy presents the best economic performance in every case.

References

Kamasak, R. (2011). Firm-specific versus industry structure factors in explaining performance variation. Empirical evidence from Turkey. Management Research Review, 34(10), 1125-1146.