Competitive Priorities and Export Success of Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Firms in Singapore

The semiconductor manufacturing sector in Singapore as a knowledge-based and innovation-driven sector has grown as one of the most important world suppliers for wafers in a way that today up to 11% of the world's wafer output is produced in this country. Outstanding export success of firms engaged in semiconductor industry as a key manufacturing sector in Singapore necessitates studying export success of these companies from a new strategic and manufacturing view point. From such perspective, investigating factors influencing the export success of companies working in this sector is of a great significance. Using data from 36 semiconductor manufacturing units, this study intends to investigate the contribution of the firm's four competitive priorities to export success of Singaporean semiconductor equipment manufacturing firms. The four competitive priorities namely, quality, low cost, flexibility and delivery were regressed against export success through multiple regression analysis performed by SPSS 17 software using the stepwise method. The findings from this study depicted that among the four competitive priorities quality and low cost have a positive and significant relationship with export success of Singaporean semiconductor manufacturing firms while there is no significant relationship between delivery and flexibility and export success. Moreover, the study findings also illustrated that the most important competitive priority that contributed in predicting export success was quality. This study can be considered as a platform for Singaporean semiconductor manufacturing firms' managers in order to take more advantages of quality and low cost aspects of their productions especially when competing on a global scale and also planning to enter in to new international markets.