Key Success Factors for performance of the Chinese international fish value chain - A cooperative research project

This paper gives an overview of the Chinese-Norwegian trade and outlines a research program which aims to identify Key Success Factors (KSF) for performance in international seafood value chains where China and Norway play important roles. KSFs are the market forces behind performance success in trade. KSFs may be opportunities and threats in the business environment in terms of seafood demand, supply of labour, raw materials, technology etc., and in regional infrastructures. KSFs can also be found in firms' internal matching capabilities as strength and weakness in entrepreneurship, management, technology, finance etc. necessary for competitive control of the environmental KSFs. Success factors in competitive markets for some firms may also be failure factors for other firms with less competitive matching strength towards environmental opportunities and threats. Of particular interest is explaining the driving KSFs forces behind the behaviour transformation of the Chinese value chain from low cost oriented value adding (COVA) to market oriented value adding (MOVA). Such studies involving researchers in China and Norway require common theoretical and methodological analytical tools; quality assured trade databases, new data collection on industry structure, decision criteria and business models in the exporting and importing firms composing the seafood value chains.