A Statistical Study on the Relationship between Business Performance Measures and Influencing Factors/Covariates

Business performance could be influenced by many related factors (qualitative) and covariates (quantitative). This research aims at the analysis of the relationship between business performance measures and factors and covariates such as external environment, competitive strategies etc using the data of the fourth round (2005-2006) International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS). We used the four business measures in the IMSS to represent the business performance, but it turned out that only sales, market share and return on investment are the three measures significantly influenced by the chosen factors and covariates. We then applied multinomial logistic regressions, and also investigated their applicability to the measurement of business performance and significant influencing factors and covariates. We also analysed the correlation among factors and covariates. We conclude that different factors and covariates influence the performance in different ways and at different levels. The common factors affect all three performance measures are market dynamics, product focus, competition intensity, and new product frequency. However, if we look at all the significant factors/covariates categories at an individual performance level, the conclusion become complicated, and a detailed analysis is presented in the paper.