THE STRATEGY OF SPANISH INDUSTRIAL FIRMS IN THE LATE TWENTIETH
CENTURY: A CONVERGENCE FAILURE
Veronica Binda
1) DIVERSIFICATION AND CONVERGENCE
In the twentieth century the strategy of diversification has played a fundamental role in the
development of the largest industrial enterprises in the world, revealing itself to be a crucial point in
sustaining their growth and competitiveness. The decision to move into new geographical or
product markets both permitted to use the competences and the resources acquired thanks to the
core activity and created ways to escape productive ties that would have seriously mined the
activity of big firms. Alfred Chandler1 affirms that in the United States, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the new big machineries and the technologies typical of the “Second Industrial Revolution”
permitted to exploit important scale and scope economies for the first time and therefore to produce
decreasing unitary costs to the increasing quantity. The growth of the productive process efficiency
generated a large surplus that could find employment in the development of fundamental activities
for a further growth of the enterprise. The exploitation of the productive potentialities of the
machineries, the systematic investment in the activity of research and development and the
emerging of geographical or product markets to conquer, stimulated the great American enterprises
to use the surplus in the pursuing of a strategy of diversification. The birth of new lines of product
or the conquest of unexplored regions allowed the firms to continue their own growth in spite of the
conditions of the originary markets that, with the increase of competition, were saturating. Chandler
claims that the strategy of diversification proved itself winning in particular if considering products
related to the core activity, because throughout an expansion in neighboring sectors it was possible
to fully exploit sinergies in knowledge, production and distribution and to maintain the control of
the whole created system basing on competence. Above all the strategy of unrelated diversification
was successful beginning from the 1960s, even if often not long lasting in the American case.
Undertaking a radically different activity from the original one permitted a risk reduction through
its subdivision in different sectors, a lower capital cost and a better use of the managerial resources.
On the other hand, the incompetence and the incapability to organically manage such different lines
of product constituted the main risk of this strategy. The modern industrial enterprise, as described
by Chandler, rarely continues to grow or maintain a competitive position for a long time if the
addition of new units isn’t followed by the development of suitable managerial abilities.
The empirical evidence collected on the world’s largest industrial enterprises has shown that the
strategy of diversification, related or unrelated, is currently the mostly used and is the one that
guarantees a higher level of competitiveness to the American and European enterprises, regardless
of the different national contexts and business cultures of these countries. A recent analysis of two
researchers, Richard Whittington and Michael Mayer2, faced the theme of the potentially difficult
1
2
A. D. Chandler, Scale and Scope. The dynamics of industrial capitalism, Cambridge, London University Press, 1990
R. Whittington and M. Mayer, The European Corporation: Strategy, Structure and Social Science, Oxford U.P., 2000
1
destiny that diversification could have met in Europe, because of the different features of ownership
and financial structure and of the heterogeneity of the historical paths followed by these nations in
comparison to the United States. According to these authors, the obstacles met by the diversification
during its spreading in Europe have been many: France for instance, presents a system of financial
relationships, a personal capitalism and a technical culture that could have arrested the expansion of
the firms in new activities just like the predominance of the banks and the strong technical
inclination in Germany. In particular, the empirical evidence collected relatively to the feature of
ownership and to the importance covered by Rhenish capitalism model 3, in which the concentration
of the ownership is strong, seemed an obstacle to the diversification because it was suspected that
the major shareholder would have prevented an excessive expansion of the enterprise for fear of
losing its control. The results of the study on the largest industrial enterprises in France, Germany
and Great Britain in 1983 and in 1993 have not confirmed this hypothesis. In front of the greater
economic efficiency guaranteed by this strategy, the resistances have been outdone by the necessity
of remaining competitive in order to survive. The big enterprises of these countries, choosing to
grow through diversification, succeeded in emulating the American “first - movers” and to compete
with them on a functional and strategic level.
The diversification revealed itself a winning strategy also in nations with radically different models
of capitalism from the European and American ones, as Japan and South Korea. In these countries
the development of specific abilities has allowed huge industrial groups to manage different
activities with success and also to conquer the foreign markets. The path followed has not often
been the same as the American enterprises: in the Japanese and Korean case, the diversified
business groups are formed around few entrepreneurs that, having the capability, the will and the
necessary contacts to create great enterprises, have exploited them to enter different sectors. In this
system the State has played a fundamental role, protecting and sustaining the groups but requiring
the enterprises to export and to measure their competitiveness on the global market. The search of
an efficient way of production, also following a different path from the chandlerian one, has had the
same result: the creation of the fundamental organizational abilities to keep on pursuing strategies
of diversification and growth successfully.
The main interest of the analysis of the Spanish case is constituted by the fact that the political and
economical history of the country, in the twentieth century, presents strong particularities in
comparison to the nations studied by Whittington and Mayer and also in comparison to the history
of the countries protagonists of the Asian model of development, “industrial late comers” as Spain.
The Civil War and the Autarky experimented during the first decade of Franco’s period, in fact,
interrupted for a long period the growth of the great enterprises that were developing themselves at
3
M. Albert, Capitalisme contre capitalisme, Seuil, Paris, 1991
2
the beginning of the century according to the path followed by the United States and by the other
European nations, and only during the 1950s Spain succeeded in obtaining a political stability
accepted at international level and started a plan of development of the economy. In the attempt of
regaining the accumulated disadvantage, the State became the principal actor of the industrialization
and intervened both through politics of regulation and protectionism and with the foundation of
public enterprises in the main sectors. The foreign investors, that entered Spain principally with the
economic opening of the country from the end of the 1950s, were fundamental for the take-off and
the industrial development. Spain grew importantly but, at the death of Franco, the serious mistakes
committed in the economic policy and the unsolved problems, emerged powerfully. The country
left in inheritance to the democratic goverments still presented a weak economy and it had been
harshly struck by the economic crisis of the 1970s. Considering this particular path of industrial
development, the aim of the project is to analyze the strategic choices and the performance of the
great Spanish enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s. The fundamental model of development, which
the strategy of these firms is compared to, is the chandlerian one with which the Spanish enterprises
have been in contact ever since the end of the Autarky and that, throughout the action of the
European multinational firms mainly after the integration in the EEC (1986), has completely
changed the relationships of competition among the enterprises seeing the multinationals victorious
on the national firms. On the other hand it is important also to compare the behavior of the Spanish
firms with the other “late comers” that today present a strong industry in which the diversification,
even if pursued through the organizational structure of the groups and not of the multidivisionals, is
at the base of the economic prosperity.
2) METHODOLOGY AND PROBLEMS
The opening towards the outside, that Spain experimented at the end of the 1970s with the transition
to democracy, brought many economists to question themselves on the competitiveness of the
Spanish enterprises in the world market. Aware of the debate terms and of the importance that the
strategic choices had covered since the Postwar period, many researchers have analyzed the degree
of diversification of the Spanish industry in the 1980s and 1990s4, confirming its low level. These
analysis show an ample picture of the diversification choices of the Spanish firms but, studying
samples of enterprises of various dimensions, they neglect the weight of the great firms. It is in the
great industrial enterprises, in fact, that the diversification has reached its maximum level and it is
on this level that it becomes necessary to compare the results obtained from the Spanish firms with
those of the European and American enterprises. To this purpose the same criterions adopted and
E. Bueno, P. Morcillo and I. de Pablo, Dimensiones competitivas de la empresa española, in “Papeles de Economía
Española”, no. 39, 1989; F. Merino de Lucas and D. Rodríguez Rodríguez, Un analisis de la diversificación en la
industria manufacturera española, in “Actas de las X jornadas de economía industrial”, Fundación Empresa Pública,
4
3
the exact period taken in consideration by Whittington and Mayer in the analysis of the cases of
France, of Germany and of Great Britain, have been used: for 1983 and 1993 two samples, each of
which composed by the one hundred largest industrial enterprises by turnover in the country, have
been selected. The principal source used for creating the samples is the “Anuario El Pais”
publication, that reports the list of the largest enterprises every year. All the non industrial
enterprises have been eliminated from this list, according to the classification of Whittington and
Mayer: the commercial, financial, public service and construction firms, strongly present in the list,
can’t be found in the empirical analysis proposal. Subsequently the industrial firms belonging to a
same holding have been gathered thanks to the information drawn from “Duns & Bradstreet” and
“Fomento de la Producción”, considering in a unitary way the total sales of the group. Subsequently
the identity of the owner subject has been established, classifying the enterprises in foreigners and
“national” (public and private) so to exclude from the analysis the firms whose head office was in a
foreign State, and to concentrate only on the Spanish enterprises. When the sources permitted to
ascertain it, even the nature of private owners was specified, be it personal, family, banking, group
of firms, cooperative society or widespread ownership, because the affiliation to one or the other
category often implicated a different propensity in undertaking investments and risks, enlarging the
company, submitting its control to external managers, moving into other makets. It has finally been
necessary to identify the strategy adopted by each of the national enterprises, cataloging it
according to the classification proposed by Whittington and Mayer for other European States. They
measured the strategy classifying it in four types:
- “Single business strategy” if at least the 95% of the turnover originated from a single activity;
- “Dominant business strategy” if an activity reached at least 70%, but didn't overcome the 95% of
the turnover;
- “Related diversification strategy” if no activity reached the 70% of the turnover, but there were
market or technological relationships among different activities;
- “Unrelated diverisification strategy” if no activity reached the 70% of the turnover and almost no
technological or market relationship existed among different activities5.
The peculiarity of some of the great Spanish enterprises’ features made it difficult, if not
impossible, to completely follow the methodology adopted for the other European countries. The
conclusive role that the foreign enterprises cover in the Spanish samples, first of all, limits the
sources of the data. While in France, Germany and Great Britain the “national” samples were
composed in average from 70 enterprises, in the Spanish case the analyzable firms in 1983 were 66
and in 1993 only 38, statistically provoking the pursuit of less significative results. Besides
Madrid, 1994; I. Súarez González, Estrategia de diversificación y resultados de la empresa española, in “Revista de
Economía Aplicada”, no. 4, 1994
5
R. Whittington and M. Mayer, cit., p. 163
4
Whittington and Mayer, when confronting industrial groups, took only the group leader in
consideration, while in the Spanish case a similar choice is not adequate because the role practiced
by the largest industrial enterprises, that are those belonging to the public groups INI and INH,
would be eliminated from the calculation effected for the strategy, considering them as if they
weighed “one” in their totality and firms of smaller dimension in comparison to those considered
for the other countries would be inserted in the sample. For this reason both the necessities have
been taken in consideration, counting the strategy of every group only once but avoiding to insert in
the samples firms of reduced dimensions, often all single business, that would have unbalanced it,
reducing the weight that the great groups practice in the sense of a greater diversification and
moving the analysis from the large enterprise to very small companies, incomparable with those of
the rest of Europe. In the calculation of the first one hundred enterprises, therefore, the great firms
belonging to the INI and the INH have been counted separately although their strategy and their
structure has uniformly been considered, making it coincide with the group one and counting it only
once. The last remarkable problem in the analysis has been the computing of the strategy one. The
sources analyzed for this type of investigation are various: for what concerns the classification of
the productive activity of the enterprises the international codes of classification of the industrial
activities (SIC) have been considered6. The SIC were needed above all for cataloging with precision
the type of developed activity, but they didn’t permit a cataloguing of the strategy adopted because
they do not allow a measurement of the activities’ correlation degree and neither of the sales
percentage guaranteed by every type of product. For this reason, besides the SIC, has been used an
intuitive logic concerning the correlation among activities and other sources for the measurement of
the percentage of sales guaranteed to the company from every product. The most significant
quantity of this information is in the major economic newspapers and periodicals’ files of the years
between 1982 and 1994 (El Pais, El Mundo, Actualidad Económica, Dinero, Fomento de la
producción, Inversión, Mercado). Other data have emerged from the Informes Anuales of the firms,
from the commemorative publications published in the event of particular anniversaries of the
foundation of the companies, from business cases, from monographic publications on single
enterprises and from the biographies of the most important Spanish entrepreneurs.
3) EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
3.1) RESULTS
Even if in smaller proportion in comparison to the samples composed by firms of various
dimensions, the most greater Spanish companies confirm the tendency to a low level of
diversification in comparison to the European ones (table 1).
España – 10.000 principales empresas españolas/84, Duns and Bradstreet, Madrid, 1984; España 30.000 principales
empresas españolas/93, Duns and Bradstreet, Madrid, 1994
6
5
Table 1 - Strategy of the 100 largest industrial enterprises in Europe
Spain
France
Germany
Great Britain
1983
1993
1983
1993
1983
1993
1983
1993
Single Business
63,1%
60%
24,3%
19,4%
18,3%
12,7%
6,7%
4,5%
Dominant Business
7,8%
15%
10,8%
15,2%
16,7%
7,9%
16%
10,4%
Related Diversification
15,7%
15%
52,7%
51,5%
40%
47,6%
66,7%
61,2%
13,1%
10%
12,2%
13,6%
25%
31,7%
10,7%
23,9%
Unrelated
Diversification
Source: proper Elaboration and Whittington and Mayer, The European corporation
As occurred in the United States, also in Europe the largest industrial enterprises in the 1980s and
1990s showed the results of a growth persecuted throughout diversification (dominant business or
related or unrelated diversification) in over the 60% of the cases, while the percentage of single
business firms seldom reached the 20%. The tendency at the end of the century shows an
intensification of this course: the number of enterprises assembled on their “core business”
decreased in all the nations between 1983 and 1993. The results obtained in Spain are very
different: in both these years a total predominance of the single business strategy can be noticed,
with values that overcome the 60%, despite the fact that the 1980s and the European integration had
created many opportunities of growth for the Spanish enterprises. In 1993, in comparison to a light
diminution of the number of the single business firms, only dominant business strategy benefited,
while those of related and unrelated diversification subsequently fell behind. The decision to
assemble their own activity in an only product was dominant at the beginning of the democratic
phase and did not suffer big variations even if the economic conditions of the new period were
favorable to strategic improvements and the widening of their own markets. The largest Spanish
enterprises at the end of last century had rarely undertaken the strategy of the diversification as a
path of growth, and when they tried it, in most of the case they did not have a positive performance
often incurring in real disasters. The elements that have hindered their choice of diversifying are
numerous, they have both economic nature and political origin and are the results of interaction
among foreign and national, public and privates actors. The picture shown in the 1983 sample,
allows many topics of reflection.
3.2) EXPLANATORY FACTORS
3.2.1 - ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND DIVERSIFICATION
The principal factor that has started the pursuit of diversification strategies in the large American
enterprises was the accumulation of a huge quantity of resources thanks to a radical improvement of
the productive process of the core activity and the pursuit of scale and scope economies. Had a
similar process of accumulation of wealth ever occurred in the same period in any national firm in
Spain? Had the Spanish industrial enterprises reached the dimensions that had been the motor of the
growth and the critical stage that had allowed the foreign competitors to face with the right
6
resources the adventure of diversification? In 1983 no Spanish firm was present among the major
one hundred industrial enterprises by sales in the world, and only two of them can be found in the
European list7. In this outline the public firms had chosen to grow up to the maximum ceiling of the
domestic market and they had remained small in comparison to the European rivals8. These great
firms grew in protected sectors and they had scarce incentives to increase their own
competitiveness. Besides they suffered from obstacles in the management which made it difficult to
pursue a rational and efficient strategy because the economic aims were overlapped by the political
and social finalities, that implicated a notable use of business resources9. The surplus was often
nonexistent, above all for the enterprises belonging to the great public holding INI: in 1983 the
group was not profitable because of the crisis of the 1970s, that had forced it to save and to gather
under its own guardianship a big number of enterprises belonging to various sectors. The State
didn't have either the necessary resources to restore to health all these firms or the organizational
and managerial competences to manage such a vast and diversified group10. The result was a drain
of resources from the most profitable enterprises to those in difficulty and a worsening of the
economic conditions of all the public firms. In this context it is not possible to assert that at the
beginning of the 1980s in the public firms (that were also relatively the largest of the country by
sales) that surplus of resources produced by the efficiency that Chandler held at the base of a solid
process of growth was present.
The private enterprises suffered from the competition of a rival which, even without being
competitive, was of greater dimensions and had privileged resources and they often didn't succeed
in growing much, as underlined by the 1983 sample. Up to the end of the 1980s the data underline
how the Spanish firms had the lowest rate of self-financing among the countries of the OECD11 and
were in difficulty in retrieving resources from a small and inefficient Stock Exchange and almost
totally depended on the banker's loans. Difficulties were also strong in this field: often the banks
granted credit to their own enterprises or to clients protected by the State and wouldn't risk their
own capital in other smaller unprotected firms and with more uncertain results. The private firms
not supported by the goverment, because of the banking sector conformation in those years,
suffered both from the difficulty in obtaining credit and from an elevated cost of the loan, that
brought the external indebtedness to be heavier. Between the 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s
the financial costs of the non-financial enterprises overcame their rate back on the investments in
7
Anuario El Pais, Madrid Prisa, Madrid, 1985, pp. 360-361
A. Carreras e X. Tafunell, “Spain: big manufacturing firms between State and Market, 1917-1990”, in A. Chandler, F.
Amatori and T. Hikino, Big business and the wealth of nations, Cambridge University Press, 1997
9
A. López Muñoz, El debate sobre la empresa pública, in “Anuario El Pais 1983”, Madrid Prisa, Madrid, 1985, p. 273
10
F. Comín and P.Martín Aceña, La empresa pública en la España contemporanea”, in F. Comín and P. Martín Aceña,
La empresa pública en la historia de España, Civitas, Madrid, 1996
11
S. Peréz, Banking on privilege: the politics of Spanish financial reform, Ithaca, N. Y., Cornell University Press, 1997
8
7
average of quite a lot12. The only private enterprises able to sometimes have the necessary resources
to their growth and to have approached the critical dimensional level that in the United States had
preceded the stage of diversification, were in most of the cases directly of banking ownership
(almost half of the 1983 sample private firms) and those that benefited from some public support. In
these cases the availability of resources did not always coincided with the propensity of the owner
to embark upon strategies of diversification and with the presence of other necessary factors to be
successful. The low level of internal resources and the difficulty in obtaining them from the outside
context made it concretely impossible to grow and to diversify in capital-intensive sectors, in which
the great machineries and the efficient nets of distribution that constitute the source of the
economies of scale and scope need huge investments of initial capital and a lot of money for their
maintenance.
3.2.2 - THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN INFLUENCING THE CHOICES OF DIVERSIFICATION
The goverment interventionism in the economy played a remarkably important role in the life of the
enterprises since the beginning of the Francoist period, with results still visible today in the
mentality and in the strategy of many enterprises. The intervention of the State influenced the
choices of diversification of the firms through different channels. First of all the missed
achievement of the critical level of resources by the private firms to enter new activities is partly
referable to the difficulties that they faced in the growth, because of the public enterprises’
competition and the regulation in some sectors. Secondly the economic policy has indirectly
intervened in the choices of the entrepreneurs, creating a climate in which the growth of the
enterprises and the pursuit of efficient economic strategies as diversification wasn’t stimulated. In
the United States a decisive impulse to the geographical and product diversification originated from
the progressive saturating of the original markets due to the increase of the productivity and
competition, that had caused a diminution of the returns and made the entry in new activities
essential. In Spain a strong protectionism until the 1970s managed to make many industrial
enterprises face the challenges set by the market only in recent times. The traditional strategies in
the domestic market continued to be effective for a longer time and they remained profitable thanks
to the goverment protection: incentives to undertake new and more competitive tactics were
missing. When the period of protectionism concluded also in Spain, the national enterprises had
accumulated such a delay in comparison to the great multinationals already in the country to make,
in most of the cases, a later diversification useless in the markets already saturated by foreign
products13. It is finally not to be excluded that a form of “political capitalism” accompanied the
growth of these enterprises, that focused their attention on the agreement with the political world,
J. A. Maroto Acín, La situación empresarial en España, 1982-1989, in “Cuadernos de Información Económica”, 4445
13
I. Suárez González, Estrategia de diversificación y resultados de la empresa española, cit.
12
8
from which financings and protection could originate, more than on the economic advantages that
an efficient strategy of diversification would have been able to guarantee, preferring a growth for
political bargaining to a development of economic efficiency. This behaviour is not new to the
strategies of growth in the industrial “late comer” countries, in which the State played a great
economic role: in the Italian case at least half of the great enterprises, between the two Wars, had
their reference more in the State than in the market, often choosing to move into unrelated sectors.
This growth didn’t aim to the lowering of the unitary costs, but it had a strategic character: it was
driven from the ambition to place the firms in better positions to bargain with the public power14.
3.2.3 - MANAGEMENT AND ENTREPRENEURS’ PROPENSITY TOWARDS
DIVERSIFICATION
The characteristics and the attitudes of the entrepreneurs can form an obstacle to the strategies of
growth: the feature of the ownership of the enterprises in particular has been indicated by the
researchers as a determinant of the development process, since convenient strategies for a certain
category of entrepreneurs can be unsuitable for others. One of the main variables in the strategic
choices is constituted by the concentration degree of the ownership in the hands of the owner. In a
same economic area enterprises of widespread ownership among thousands of small shareholders
administrated by managers can coexist with firms completely possessed by only one entrepreneur,
jealous of his own control and that avoids the intervention of other people as far as possible in the
management. In this last case, increasing the number of his own products means to accept inside the
firms a radical change of the organizational structure, that has to adapt to a more articulated
strategy, accepting to decentralize in order to administrate and supervise the single products and
markets with efficiency. The number of people involved in the management must increase just as
the degree of autonomy of which they can dispose, condition that the entrepreneurs are reluctant to
accept. In France, Germany and Great Britain, despite the strong weight covered by the personal
capitalism and the banks, great diversified enterprises were born when this model manifested its
superiority in the competitive arena. In Spain the number of enterprises whose ownership is
constituted from only one or few individuals in the analyzed period is extremely consistent. The
Exchange has not played a fundamental role in recent times and that dispersion of ownership
oriented to the short period occured in the United States thanks to emerging of the Exempted
Dealers didn’t take place. Up to the end of the 1980s the national firms in most of the cases were
under the dominion or the important influence of few great shareholders: the State, the banks or the
private entrepreneurs. The propensity of these owners to accept a diffused managerial control
necessary to pursue the strategy of diversification efficiently was different from each case. The
State, for its own nature, has always used administrators but they were strongly conditioned in their
14
F. Amatori and A. Colli, Impresa e Industria in Italia dall’Unità a oggi, Marsilio, Venezia, 1999
9
own management from social and political aims ordered by the goverment, that, when suggesting to
pursue strategies of diversification often acted out of the economic logics implicating disastrous
results. The banks were accused of having controlled great enterprises essential for the wealth of the
nation maintaining a scarce interest in the development of long period strategies for their
management and leaving them to foreigners in the moment of greater difficulty and deprived of
managerial experience. The private entrepreneurs, unlike what occurred in other European
countries, have generally shown a certain aversion to risk and a marked hostility towards the
transfer of power, preventing in this way the growth of their own enterprises. Confirming this
tendency some researchers have underlined how the economic rationality in many cases has been
hindered in the Spanish enterprises by owners reluctant to accept new solutions, emphasizing the
difficulties that the managers have faced in proposing their own opinion to often authoritarian
entrepreneurs, convinced that the industrial world was subject to a rigid hierarchy and to unyielding
rules dictated by a person that claimed to know “more than the others and better than others” 15.
It must be added that the same managers, had they succeeded in getting the control on the
enterprise, seemed hostile to undertake new activities. The managers often had had a strong
technical formation and, although damaging the rational choice of diversification of risk in various
activities and of exploitation of the scope economies, preferred to focalize on their own original
activity. In 1993 Spain was still the European country in which the engineer-managers had most of
the power16 and this characteristic made the Spanish case radically different from the Anglo-Saxon
one, in which one of the principal growth phases of the enterprises was the transition from the
engineer-managers to the MBA managers, educated at Harvard with the “method of cases” and
convinced that a manager could manage every type of activity independently from having a specific
formation on the product in consideration and therefore more inclinable to diversify the firms17. In
Spain entrepreneurs and management, principal authors of the strategy of the great enterprises,
often agreed on the decision not to estrange from their own core activity.
3.2.4 - INNOVATION AND DIVERSIFICATION
A further conclusive factor in inhibiting the possibility of the entrepreneurs to diversify is
constituted by the lower innovative level that characterized the Spanish enterprises still in the
1990s. In the United States and in Europe the introduction of the business function of research and
development was one of the keys of success in order to conquer new markets and to move into new
sectors: improve their own products, develop new goods or accomplish the productive process
were an essential base both for increasing the efficiency of the core activity, lowering the costs of it,
and for having success in proposing innovative goods. The dialogue among the analysers of market
15
M. Guillén, Models of management, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 201
Así son los ejecutivos europeos, in “Actualidad Económica”, no. 1803, 11 gennaio 1993, pp. 64-66
17
A. D. Chandler, The visible hand. The managerial revolution in American Business, Harvard University Press, 1977
16
10
and the department of research and development became more and more a fundamental condition to
diversify their own activity with success and to propose, in advance in comparison to the
competition, an interesting product for the demand in the right geographical market. In the Spanish
case all the measures of the innovation indicate scarce success in this field18. A big part of the firms
in the samples didn’t institutionalize the function of research and development if not in recent times.
In 1983, the percentage of investments in this activity in comparison to the GDP was the lowest of
the OECD after the Portuguese one and didn't even constitute a fifth of the American ratio, that was
the first one of the list in that year19. Spain doesn’t seem not even to have gathered the advantages
of the small enterprises’ dynamism that usually are protagonists of spontaneous innovations: the
number of patent requests was clearly inferior in comparison to the other European countries. In
1986 Germany could count 40.875 requests from its own citizens, France 13.919, the United
Kingdom 22.892 and Spain only 1.649. A constantly negative technological balance made it more
difficult for the Spanish entrepreneurs to enter new sectors successfully because, in order to have
fortune, it was necessary to produce competitive goods and to have more efficient productive
processes and, not having a propensity towards innovation, it needed to invest resources in
purchasing of other people’s patents. The depending on foreign countries and the carrying of these
costs constituted a further obstacle to the entrance in new sectors and therefore to the same
diversification.
3.2.5 - ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES AND DIVERSIFICATION
The last factor that influences the possibility of diversifying is perhaps the most important one: the
development of the organizational capabilities. Chandler uses the concept of organizational
capability as a key element for the growth of the enterprises: the creation, the maintenance and the
development of these capabilities by the manpower and the direction in the original activity,
allowed the American, European and Japanese enterprises to grow through the pursuing of
successful strategies founded upon solid organizational bases20. Have the Spanish firms been able to
create these organizational capabilities? The elements considered in the preceding paragraphs
presume a negative answer to this question: the great Spanish enterprises in the 1980s were small
and inefficient and they had never reached the levels of scale and scope economies that had
guaranteed success to the other countries. Yet, only a few years before there were several great
diversified groups of which there is almost no more trace in the 1983 sample. Some of these
specific cases will be analyzed in the following paragraphs, but in this context it is necessary to
underline how the great industrial Spanish enterprises developed capabilities different from the
18
Ministerio de Industria y Energía, Encuesta sobre estrategias empresariales, 1998 y 1999
P. Escorsa, F. Solé and J. M. Suris, La introducción de las nuevas tecnologias en la empresa española, in “Papeles de
Economía Española”, no. 39, 1989, p. 200
20
A. D. Chandler, What is a firm? An historical perspective, in “European Economic Review”, no. 36, aprile 1992
19
11
organizational ones, that allowed them to grow and to survive under certain circumstances also in
the absence of the chandlerian efficiency. When some conditions, inside and ouside the country,
changed, these capabilities were often not even enough to guarantee its survival. The researcher that
has mostly deepened this thematic is Mauro Guillén, who analyzed the birth and the success of the
groups of enterprises in opposition to the great chandlerian multidivisionals in the countries of late
industrialization21. In these nations, among which even Spain is considered, a convergence towards
the American model in terms of strategy and structure has not occured since the delay in the
industrialization, the role of specific institutional lines that influence the choices of competition in a
global economy and the variety of economic, political and social actors, has made the coexistence
of the “American” strategies and structures with other types of choices possible for a certain time.
Concerning the Spanish case, Guillén has underlined how, in the preceding and contemporary
period to the industrial crisis of the 1970s, there were several diversified groups around the banks,
the great chemical and iron enterprises and other enterprises belonging to the traditional sectors and
how these groups had succeeded in being successful for a certain period of time. The capability on
which they were based upon, was not the ability in achieving productive, distributive and
organizational efficiency, but in taking advantage of some conditions of asymmetry that
characterized the Spanish economy, exploiting the contacts with the State and the foreign investors.
Who possessed these contacts was able, despite the economic and technological adversities
described in advance, to deal with of a lot of different activities successfully because he could unite
the contributions coming from the State (concessions and protection), the national market and the
inputs (job, raw materials) and the resources coming from foreign countries (capital, technology) to
enter different markets. Essential condition to the suriving of these groups was the maintaining of
the asymmetries, above all for what concerns the economic relationship with the foreign nations:
the protective tariffs used in Spain and the restrictions against the foreign multinationals constituted
the principal factor of asymmetry. During the process of democratic transition and subsequently of
integration in the EEC, the liberalization of the markets destroyed these asymmetries and, together
with the results of the economic crisis of the 1970s, it implicated the collapse of nearly all these
groups under the pressure of the international competition practiced by the enterprises that had
developed organizational capabilities suitable to maintain a long period success in these sectors.
The ability of the Spanish entrepreneurs to use the asymmetries for obtaining protection, capital and
technology became obsolete as soon as these conditions started missing and the national enterprises
didn't seem to have developed organizational capabilities comparable to those of the firms of the
chandlerian model, but not even to those of the Asian model. In the case of South Korea, for
M. Guillén, The limits of convergence – globalization and organizational change in Argentina, South Korea and
Spain, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001
21
12
instance, the birth and the growth of the principal groups owes a lot to the protection of the State
and to the ability in exploiting the asymmetries that it used to allow, but the enterprises have been
able to become competitive because the State asked for the attainment of a certain performance on
the global market. Also thanks to this condition, the groups born and grown on the ability of
exploitation of the asymmetries, were forced to develop technical and organizational capabilities
that kept them competitive in the world. In Spain this didn't happen and when the foreign
multinationals were free to operate inside the country, the groups based on the exploitation of the
asymmetries in commerce and in foreign investments started to suffer while the investors took
possession of a lot of enterprises, without the collaboration of local partners. Under these conditions
some groups failed, others broke up, others returned to their core activity, others were directly given
to foreign investors. The collapse of the greatest Spanish chemical group, that had been divided
among numerous foreign multinationals during the 1980s, will be reported in the next paragraphs as
one of the greatest cases of failure of a big Spanish enterprise, characterized by this type of
capability and by the missed development of the organizational capabilities. The thesis held by
Guillén has its confirmation in the empirical evidence: the great diversified industrial groups have
almost entirely disappeared in 1983, after the failure of diversification attempts based on
capabilities, later revealing themselves obsolete, to which an increase of efficiency and an
improvement of the competitive position in the long period did not correspond.
3.3) WHAT CHANGES OCCURRED IN THE 1980s AND 1990s?
Despite the decade following 1983 has been rich of changes and opportunities, the level of
diversification of the national enterprises has not suffered great variations. In the period taken in
consideration, despite Spanish entrepreneurs could finally compete in a free market in which the
public intervention and the dominion of the banking initiative were reducing, the uncertainties and
the fears that prevented them from incurring in risks were still numerous. The delicate context of
the transition to democracy had still not created, at the beginning of the 1980s, such an economical
and political stability to allow the entrepreneurs to operate in a safe context. The costs for the
enterprises were elevated: at the end of the 1970s the cost of energy increased in their balances
because of the oil crises and so did the cost of money, because of a restrictive monetary policy. Also
the labour cost had a strong upsurge: the renewed role of the labor unions, forced to silence during
the Francoist period, made it more difficult for the entrepreneurs to bear the labour cost and to
manage the adjustment of the number of workers made necessary by the crisis. The context was not
favorable to a process of accumulation of the necessary resources to permit diversification and the
enterprises that tried to save themselves from the crisis undertaking new activities without having
the money and the necessary competences, failed in their intents. The situation worsened because
the Spanish firms re-emerging from the crisis and that could have stabilized their own performance
13
and set out along a new growth path, attracted the attentions of the foreign investors: in few years
they purchased most of the national enterprises. The decision to sell their own companies, after the
entrance of Spain in the EEC and the opening of the domestic market, wasn’t without economic
rationality: the competitive superiority of the foreign rivals was evident and the risk to be defeated,
in the new competitive arena of the European market by the great American and European
multinationals was almost a certainty. The multinationals had followed the path pointed out by
Chandler since the Postwar period, they had purchased a position of firm protagonism and, at that
time, they were enormous companies throughout the whole world. These enterprises achieved scale
and scope economies, they had lower unitary costs, a financial structure able to cover temporary
deficits in some markets and internationally known brands. The Spanish enterprises in the 1980s
instead were still small and inefficient and, also where they had succeeded in growing in greater
measure, the energetic and economic crisis of the 1970s had seriously put their ability of survival to
test. Choosing to move into other sectors at the beginning of the 1980s and in the period that
followed, was consequently an a unsuitable option, since the markets had already been conquered
by the most efficient foreign multinationals and the private enterprises didn't have either the
financial advantages or the suitable competences or a level of innovation such to allow them to try
new ways. The choice of selling the enterprises to consolidated foreign multinationals changed the
Spanish industrial context decreeing the failure of the industry in the convergence towards the
model of the large diversified industrial enterprise proposed by Chandler, but contemporarily it
confirmed the economic superiority of this form of enterprise, whose pioneers had conquered the
world markets: in 1993 almost all of the one hundred enterprises at the vertex of the sales in Spain
were foreign diversified multinationals. Among these, of the twenty industrial groups remaining of
Spanish ownership, only three of them had decided to undertake a dominant business strategy, other
three of related diversification and only two of unrelated diversification. The other enterprises
survived maintaining themselves to single business but entering, where possible, in nets of firms
that often allowed a partial economic compensation, frequently tied up to foreign multinationals.
4) SOME PARTIAL SUCCESSES
This general picture of obstacle to the choices of diversification and of bad performance of the big
firms illustrated up to now, mustn’t cover the success up of some firms that, although maintaining
various types of limits to their development, understood what direction to follow and were
successful. An example is represented from the firm of Tomás Pascual Sanz: Leche Pascual. The
birth of this enterprise is dated 1969, when the entrepreneur managed to get a financing from the
Savings Bank of Burgos and took over an old factory of an Aranda breeder cooperative that dealt
with the treating and the bottling of 3.000 liters of milk per day22. In the year 2000, the same factory
22
“Leche Pascual”, in P. Nueno, las 49 empresas con más futuro, Ediciones Gestión 2000, Barcelona, 1996, p. 115
14
produced 1,6 million liters23. Pascual invested a huge quantity of resources both in the productive
machineries, that made the enterprise one of the greatest of its sector, and in research and
development, that allowed it to compete with the greatest multinationals. It also devoted a lot of
attention to the development of the product distribution, making an enormous effort to reach the
sales points in the least time possible and using the experience that he had accumulated
administering the relationship with the retail dealer for his father’s firm. In particular Pascual
believed the channel of the distribution to be such an important element, to base the process of
diversification on the exploitation of the marketing sinergies in the sales points, entering in 1975 in
the mineral water sector throughout the purchase of three firms in this sector. The entrepreneur
thought the new strategy to be:“…More than a diversification, a natural enlargement of the product
line and the optimization of the human resources in the commercial sector24.” In 1987, the
diversification continued in the juice sector with the acquisition of Zumosol and in 1991 in the
breakfast cereals through Cereales Expandidos. While the investments in the productive ability of
milk continued with the opening of new factories, in 1992, Pascual entered the branch of desserts
based on milk and in 1994 in the market of yogurts. In the 1990s the strategy of the enterprise
reached its highest point in the geographical diversification: having obtained the leadership in the
domestic market, Pascual fixed the next aim in the international brand growth. Currently the exports
are assembled in Europe, in America and in Africa25. Leche Pascual has succeeded in successfully
diversifying its activity both in the new geographical and product markets, basing on resources and
competences, without suffering the competition of foreign investors and operating in a sector in
which the intervention of the State didn’t reveal itself as consistent as in the others.
Another case of success on a strategic level concerns the chemical Catalan firm Carburos Metálicos,
born in 1897 thanks to a group of Swiss investors belonging to the Société of Enterprises
Électriques and of the Parisian firm Société des Carbures Métalliques. The decision to found a
similar enterprise in Spain was determined by the market prospects of this product: the gas that
could be produced by the carbide was used for illumination. The firm grew in the first decade of the
century, through the construction of factories, the foundation of new participated firms and the
acquisition of chemical companies26, but when the difficulties of transport that had prevented the
diffusion of the electricity were sorted out, and this latter revealed itself to be the winning
illumination form, Carburos Metálicos had to radically revise its own strategy. The answer to the
crisis was originated from another channel of the carbides use: the welding metals. The greatest
results are visible after the Civil War, when the industrial growth imposed a contextual boom of the
23
E. Torres, Los 100 empresarios españoles del siglo XX, LID, Madrid, 2000, p. 524
Ibidem
25
www.lechepascual.es/mundo/exportación.html
24
15
sidero-metallurgic sector and of the welding one. The resources of Carburos Metálicos increased
and the enterprise, that was now in the hands of a group of Spanish banks, could diversify with
success both constituting a firm for the construction of machineries for the welding, and entering
the production of nitrogen, hydrogen and other atmospheric gases. The crisis of the 1970s was
particularly hard for this enterprise, but it was also brightly overcome thanks to the intervention of
the world leader firm in the atmospheric gases sector, the U.S. Air Products. In 1982 it acquired a
minority share in the firm capital, it brought the most advanced technology in the production and in
the chemical transformation of the gases and it automatized the productive cycle but contemporarily
it turned the Spanish entrepreneurs out. Progressively the Americans consolidated their presence
acquiring the major part of the company and they confirmed its success. The case of Carburos
Metálicos is meaningful since the growth of this enterprise continued for more than a century
thanks to the ability in using the more favorable - in terms of sales - industrial application according
to the period and in diversifying, when necessary, following the changes of the market. The success
of this strategy is also due to an efficient organizational structure capable of managing different
activities that go from the welding to the sanitary medical material, although maintaining a unitarity
of the strategic direction in order to recognize the right moment to undertake or to end an activity.
This enterprise, also thanks to the fundamental contribution of foreign investors, has shown such a
strategic and structural flexibility that permits it to be successful despite the other chemical
enterprises’ competition and the economic and political problems that have characterized the
Spanish twentieth century.
5) THE GREAT FAILURES
The strategy of diversification attracted the attention of some great Spanish firms especially
beginning from the 1970s, but most of these diversification attempts had disastrous results for
economic and organizational causes. The reasons that pressed the great enterprises to move into
new sectors were very far from those described by Chandler: this choice was often not taken for
investing a surplus during the period of growth, but as an attempt of survival by enterprises whose
original activity had been compromised during the economic crisis of those years and, as Guillén
affirms, as an occasion to exploit the contacts and the asymmetries in a period in which they
allowed an easy growth. The decision to undertake new activities for the Spanish enterprises
occurred in most of the cases without having the necessary resources nor a suitable planning of the
strategy to pursue and of the new born conglomerate management modalities. The mergers among
big companies transformed themselves into the addition of each firm’s debts and didn't bring any
increase of efficiency: only one managerial group administrated products and markets of which it
La Sociedad Española de Carburos Metálicos, S. A. – Cent’anys d’historia d’una empresa química 1897 – 1997, S.
E. Carburos Metálicos BOBALÁ, 1997
26
16
hadn’t have any knowledge and of a quantity and variety that made it impossible to administer them
at the same moment. The situation is described correctly by some Spanish researchers in the 1980s:
“The enterprises invest in new sectors where they have no competence when they both cannot
realistically resolve the structural problems of their current activities and they weaken their already
precarious financial condition, confiding in the idea that the diversification can be the universal
solution to every problem27.”
In the United States, besides, the diversification of the great enterprises implicated an evolution of
the structure, that had learned to adapt to the new productive procedure. The multidivisional
structure is based on the coexistence of various divisions (each specific of a product or of a
geographical market) having its own business functions (production, finance, marketing, etc.) but
integrated and coordinated from only one general quarter with strategic task and a system coherence
guarantee aim. The sharing of the enterprise control became fundamental for an efficient
management: a form of “managerial capitalism” was born, characterized by the power distribution
inside the firm, in which who didn't possess any shares of the firm, had the means to decide its fate.
The multidivisional structure remained the “one best way” for the management of the diversified
enterprises until the 1970s and it is still the predominant structure among the great Western
enterprises28. In Spain, in the 1980s, no great firm had adopted this type of structure and the lack of
rationality was evident in the confused and not coordinated decisions that characterized the more
diversified firms, with strong repercussions on their performance. The structure of greater success
was that of the groups described by Guillén, which allowed them to maximize the contacts and the
cross participations more than the managerial efficiency.
The failure of diversification of the enormous chemical industries, that aroused great clamor in
Spain in the 1980s, fully illustrates all these circumstances. The origins of the Unión Española de
Explosivos and of the Compañía Española de Minas Río Tinto respectively dated the end of the
XIX and of the XVIII century; the former company developed in the chemical industry as the
Spanish branch of the Trust Nobel, and the latter, after having been of the English Riotinto
Company Ltd. property, active in the mining explorations of the copper sector, became of Spanish
banking property in 195429. In 1970 these two companies decided to merger, giving birth to
Explosivos Río Tinto, and this fusion constituted the beginning of the growth, pursued through a
series of acquisitions that made ERT the most diversified private Spanish enterprise. Its activities
belonged to different sectors that concerned chemistry, petroleum, food industry, hotel activity and
book industry. The intense growth of ERT, protected thanks to the good relationships with the
political system, occurred, however, without the contextual construction of an organizational
27
E. Bueno, P. Morcillo e I. de Pablo, Dimensiones competitivas de la empresa española, cit.
R. Whittington e M. Mayer, The European Corporation, cit.
29
E. Buenos Campos, Dirección estrategica de la empresa – Metodología, técnicas y casos, Piramide, Madrid, 1993
28
17
structure suitable to the necessities of central coordination and without the development of the
organizational capabilities. The entrance in new sectors, instead of producing those advantages that
were thought to conduct to a growth of the enterprise, involved huge outlays of resources carelessly
done, and a politics of strong foreign indebtedness. Before the coming of the crisis of the 1970s,
ERT was already heavily indebted, with a strong decrease of product demand and with a structure
that was incapable to face the situation created30. The crisis influenced not only the results of the
unrelated activities, but also those of the activities related with the principal one, undertaken when
looking for scale and scope economies, that could not enjoy any resources not even of the necessary
rational management to get favorable results. At the end of 1982 the communication was sent to all
the creditors saying that the enterprise would not to be able to pay all its debts31. In January 1983,
Escondrillas, an industrial engineer imposed by the Minister of the Industry, Solchaga, was elected
president, and began a plan of radical restructuring. The Escondrillas rebirthing project allowed a
gradual restarting guaranteeing the survival of ERT, despite the pressure practiced by the banks
worried about not receiving their credits and desirous to intervene in the management of the
group32. ERT rationalized its productive activity and put thirty enterprises in sale33, arousing a
clamor well described by a journalist of “Mercado”:
“Within a couple of years, the major Spanish petrochemical group will be reduced to a modest
mini- holding, with a modest perspective of profitability. In the meantime, the multinationals in the
chemistry-pharmaceutics branch, will have obtained half of ERT at an excellent price34.”
In 1987, ERT had transformed fundamentally into a petrolchemistry enterprise and even the sold
companies had recovered the level of profitability lost in the preceding years. In the same year
started the negotiations in order to effect a new, great merger: the one between ERT and the second
Spanish chemical colossus, Cros. Cros was born as a sulphuric acid production enterprise in 1817.
Subsequently it had entered the fertilizing sector and it had quickly grown, building a series of
factories and entering new productive areas35. In 1982 Cros was diversified in many activities
unrelated with the core one, but the results of the group weren’t positive and the loss of the
chemical firms had increased, passing from 164 to 1.918 million pesetas36, in a sector that didn't
show signs of resumption from the crisis that had invested it in the 1970s. Only in 1985 Cros,
favored by the change of the economic cycle and by a program of rationalization, restarted growing
30
R. Tamames, Estructura Económica de España, Alianza, Madrid, 1992, p. 387
E. Bueno Campos, Dirección estrategica de la empresa, cit., pp. 380-395
32
J. Cacho, “ERT – La banca reta al Gobierno”, in “Mercado”, no. 90, 1983, pp. 10-14
33
Divisiones ricas, divisiones pobres, in “Mercado”, no. 87, 1983, pp. 36
34
C. García – Abadillo, Ventas de primavera en ERT, in “Mercado”, no. 116, 1983, pp. 36-39
35
A. Carreras and X. Tafunell, National enterprise, National Enterprise. Spanish big manufacturing firms (19171990) between State and Market, Economics Working Paper 93, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 1994, p. 34
36
Cros, 2.000 millones de pérdidas, in “Mercado”, no. 98, 1983, p.36
31
18
and increasing its sales37. While the two greater chemical enterprises were recovering from the
respective crises and returning to produce the core products after the projects of diversification the
group of kuwaitian investors KIO, that was buying shares in different Spanish firms in those years,
intervened. They purchased a packet of Cros shares and subsequently, through this, of ERT, until,
after a real battle with the biggest Spanish banks, they obtained the control of the companies and
tied them throughout cross participations. Together with the entry of the Kuwaitian investors in the
Board of Directors of the firm, Escondrillas sent in the resignations together with eight advisers
who were those who had mostly contributed to the restructuring of the group. In 1988 KIO ended
the merger between ERT and Cros creating the ERCROS Group, “… a great industrial group,
structured in different areas of activity arisen from mergers, divisions, disinvestments and
transfers38.” The group dealt with fertilizers, electrochemistry and elettrotecnics, mining activities,
agricultural machineries, alimentaries, real estate activities, food for animals, scientific research,
engineering consultations and financial activities. Even in this case however, the results were
different from those desidered: ERCROS had a crisis in 1992 because of the loss coming from the
fertilizing sector and for the global mismanagement of the KIO Group in Spain. The Gulf War and
the Kuwaitans’ intentions of disinvestment created a lot of confusion, increased by the inactivity of
the Industry Office39. The attempt to compensate the bad performances and the financial difficulties
of these enterprises throughout a strategy of diversification based on the interacting of the political
world, of the banks and of the foreign investors, proved to be disastrous once again.
Also for the public enterprises the pushing towards diversification was beyond economic rationality
and followed social and political priorities. The INI entered different sectors in some cases to save
enterprises in difficulty, and in others to promote the development of strategic sectors. In 1983, the
assets of INI, through the enterprises directly possessed, originated above all from the electric
energy sector followed by the automobile industry, the aerial transport, the iron metallurgy industry,
and the Defense. The other sectors of activity were: mining industry, naval constructions,
equipments, aluminum, food industry, electronics and computer science, fertilizers, maritime
transport, textiles, tourism and culture40. The consequences of this diversification, dictated from
social and political aims were never positive, especially in the industrial sectors that were the
principal goal of the rescues: the charge in dealing with the activities for which the companies had
no financial resources or competences brought to the crisis of the “rescuing” companies together
with the “rescued” ones. The lack of a unitary strategy coordinating the enterprises made it
Francisco Godía: “La entrada al Mercado Común nos va a exigir un esfuerzo enorme en los próximos años”, in
“Fomento de la producción”, no. 889, 1985, pp. 26-27
38
Ercros, Memoria 1993, p. 4 e p. 11
39
R. Tamames, Estructura Económica de España, cit., p. 387
40
INI Informe Anual 1983, p.12
37
19
impossible to manage a situation in which different firms, that absorbed resources without returning
suitable levels of profit, cohabited in an incoherent way.
Another case of diversification imposed by political motives is the one of the public enterprise
Tabacalera, monopolist of tobacco and stamped values. Since the 1980s this company suffered from
a pressure practiced by two parts: on one hand there was the State which, being present in its Board
of Directors through a representative of the goverment, asked Tabacalera to intervene in sectors
unrelated with its activities, in order to save enterprises in crisis; on the other hand, there was a
series of factors that brought the company to question on the future profitability of its activities and
to take an interest in other businesses. The Law on Publicity in 1988 made some anti - smoke
tendencies concrete, prohibiting the publicity of products for smokers on television. In addition to
this, Tabacalera had to bear an increasing prohibition of the use of tobacco in public places, that
obviously repressed the demand of it41. Such forecasts and the pressures practiced by the goverment
brought Tabacalera in 1985 to decide to diversificate its activities moving in the food industry
sector. The level of diversification of the group grew in a remarkable way: if in 1983 the SIC codes
that described its activities were only two, in 1993 they had become nineteen. Nevertheless in the
following years the firms of the group didn’t obtain good results and Tabacalera was forced to sell
many parts of the group, also some of the largest ones42. The orders coming from the goverment
had imposed the acquisition of enterprises in difficulty to a rather solid company, making the
performance of the same enterprise negative as well. Besides, the choice of diversifying rose the
moment the incomes of the main activity were decreasing and the probability to help enterprises in
difficulty with success was consequently low, just as the probability to save themselves from the
crisis through a unrelated diversification effected without the resources and the suitable
competences.
7) NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE GREAT ENTERPRISES?
The missed convergence of strategies of the largest industrial Spanish enterprises towards the model
of great enterprise or diversified group that dominates today the big American, European and
Asians firms is an indisputable fact. Different factors have contributed to this result, inserted in the
economic and political context of a country in late industrialization, that finds itself competing with
great multinationals with more efficient strategies and structures, already strong before the national
enterprises started to grow. These competitors' presence on the foreign market and on the domestic
one, has radically changed the competitive conditions, and for the Spanish companies in the 1970s
the same organizational abilities were difficult to create under such different contexts in comparison
to those in which their rivals had developed theirs. The abilities that allowed some great groups to
41
42
R. Tamames, Estructura Económica de España, cit.
Tabacalera – cuidado con el descontrol de los costes, in “Inversión”, no. 10, 1993, p. 25
20
diversify in the 1970s, were not based on the pursuit of efficiency but on the ability in crossing
relationships among national resources, foreign investors and political actors, and they didn’t reveal
themselves so competitive when the integration in Europe forced Spain to eliminate the
asymmetries that had characterized its own commercial relationships and the capital flows with the
foreign countries up to that moment. The lack of resources, the role of the State, of the banks and of
the entrepreneurs, the low level of innovation and a naïve trust in capabilities that soon would have
become obsolete, converged, in a context of crisis, to prevent the creation of organizational
capabilities on which to form a solid strategy of such diversification, that would guarantee the
success at the end of the asymmetries. The creation of the great diversified groups didn’t conduct to
steady results and to a good performance, while the success of the industrial enterprises of the other
countries revealed conclusive in allowing them to conquer the great Spanish firms: the diversified
multinationals have conquered the great industry of the countries that did not do it.
Nevertheless, the empirical analysis of the sample doesn't consider the role of other fundamental
actors in the economic growth and in the development of the country. For instance it cannot be said
that the missed convergence towards that model and the different administration followed by the
economy and by the Spanish enterprises, prevented other organizational forms to be successful in
different sectors from those studied in this project or in enterprises of smaller dimensions. Small
and medium sized firms run by single entrepreneurs or families revealed themselves key actors for
the development of the economy, with greater propensity to the internationalization and a definite
push towards innovation. These firms have often been successful not “despite” the foreign
multinationals, but thanks to them, showing how, in a global economy, the model of development
of a country also inserts itself on the foundations thrown by others, branching according to an
original path and favouring the opportunity to develop alternative solutions towards the economic
growth. But above all, this analysis doesn’t consider the great non industrial enterprises, that at the
end of the century followed a growth in which the strategy of product or geographical market
diversification had a conclusive role in making them great multinationals and the main source of the
wealth of the nation. The non industrial enterprises are a point of departure also for the economic
growth of other nations of late industrialization: in some cases they have been so important to have
created around themselves, with a process of unrelated diversification of product, great industrial
groups. Three of the four greater chaebol of South Korea, for instance, had non industrial origins:
Samsung, Hyundai and Daewoo. Samsung grew thanks to the importation of sugar that gave it the
push to integrate vertically in the refinement activity. In this case organizational capabilities were
created, and conditions of technical efficiency were reached, even if its main activity was not
industrial but commercial. A strong diversification also interested Hyundai, who originally dealt
21
with constructions and that was able to develop the abilities to create and maintain a large
industrial group43.
An interpretation drawn by the empirical evidence on the great Spanish industry can suggest that, if
during the opening of the Spanish economy at the end of the 1970s the historical moment and the
economic cycle were not propitious for a growth through diversification for the late industrial
enterprises any more, it has not been so for those of services, which started to conquer the scene in
the 1980s and 1990s. In a world already dominated by the most efficient foreign multinationals
since the end of the War, in which the national industrial companies had not reached dimensions
and competitive levels favorable to the process of diversification, democratic Spain found new
markets in the services sector, in which it succeeded in developing great enterprises and
substantially followed the path of diversification pointed out by Chandler. The possibilities of
success were elevated above all on the growing markets that permitted the firms to find room to
compete. In some cases, the enterprises that participated to this growth could accumulate a great
surplus of resources and decide to continue their own development moving into related activities
and into industrial sectors. In the ranking by sales of the enterprises there are many non industrial
companies in pole position and their importance has meaningfully grown between 1983 and 1993.
In 1983, in order to identify the first one hundred firms in the industrial area, it has been necessary
to reach the 160th position on the chart of the enterprises with greater sales, excluding the
enterprises of the services sector. In 1993, the last firm taken in consideration in the industrial
sample, was the 195th, symptom of the fact that the proportions inside the ranking were changing,
showing a non industrial world in rapid rise. In 1999, it was necessary to reach the 225th position to
be able to find one hundred industrial enterprises: the overtaking had happened and the greatest part
of the enterprises with the majority of sales inside the country, didn't belong to the industrial field.
This statement is strengthened considering the fact that inside the proposed rankings the banks, that
the recent fusions have made more and more protagonists of the country’s economy, are not
contemplated.
In 1993, a non industrial enterprise, Telefónica, had conquered the peak of the classification.
Telefónica constitutes one of the most evident examples of success: in 1998 it was positioned
among the first ten companies of telecommunication in the world, reaching the fifth place in
Europe44 and revealing itself one of the most innovative and versatile enterprises in a sector in
continuous expansion, despite it had lost its own position of monopolist in few years. A particular
political context and a development in the ownership of the enterprise, in strategy and structure,
A. Amsden, “South Korea: groups and entrepreneurial government”, in A. Chandler, F. Amatori and T. Hikino, Big
business and the wealth of nations, cit.
44
“Telefónica, el crecimiento como lema”, in F. Mochón and A. Rambla, La creación de valor y las grandes empresas
españolas, Ariel, Barcelona, 1999
43
22
extremely similar to the one described by Chandler, contributed to the attainment of comparable
results. Although also this enterprise has been of State-owned for a long time, it experimented a
process of privatization and contextual growth in the 1990s, that brought it in 1997 to have a
diffused and totally private shareholding. The control of the enterprise was submitted to a
managerial group that undertook a strategy of internationalization of its own activity (in Spain,
Portugal, United States, Porto Rico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Chile) and
of the proper shareholding: since 1985, the enterprise started to be rated in the Exchanges in
London, Tokyo, Paris and, subsequently, New York45. The strategy used was of related
diversification on the wave of the innovations favored by the development of the many discoveries
that, in those years, distinguished the telecommunications sector and that brought it to dominate the
domestic market of fixed and mobile telephony and reach fascinating results in the television,
satellite television, book industry and movie production sectors. The structure of Telefónica, even in
this case homogeneous to the indications of Chandler, changed together with the strategy endowing
itself of a general quarter and of a top management that guaranteed a suitable coordination among
the divisions of the group. At the end of the last century Telefónica had won the challenge in terms
of growth, strategy and structure, that brought it to the first position in the world in its sector,
despite it suffered the same difficulties of the industrial enterprises relative to the role of the State
and the lack of a free-market environment. During the Spanish economic opening and the
introduction of the mechanisms of free market, Telefónica found itself fighting in sectors in full
expansion and rich of opportunities, that, unlike the already mature industrial sectors, allowed
suitable returns on the investments and the possibility to reinvest, to subsequently grow, to move in
the branches that introduced possibility of sinergy and to structure itself in order to deal with the
change in the best way.
Also the energy sector has shown a great ability of growth, of internationalization and of versatility,
diversifying in industrial and non industrial activities, as happened in the ENDESA and
IBERDROLA cases. ENDESA was born as a public enterprise in the electric energy sector in 1944.
In the 1980s and 1990s just like other State-owned firms, it was denationalized and rated in
Exchange, having in 1998 only a 3% public share46. Today ENDESA is leader in the sector and
between 1992 and 1998 it saw its Exchange capitalization quadruple47 and increase its marktet
value on the base of a notable increase of efficiency. In these years it was necessary for it to adapt
to the new tendency of the sector, characterized by the progressive liberalization and by the
increasing competitiveness, but it can be said that ENDESA has won the challenge, and can
45
Ibidem
“El grupo Endesa: la capacidad de creación de flujos de cajay un programma agresivo de inversiones”, in F. Mochón
and A. Rambla, La creación de valor y las grandes empresas españolas, cit., p. 160
47
Ibidem, p. 157
46
23
currently be considered one of the five greatest enterprises in its sector in the European Union48.
The pursued strategy was to diversify its own activity inside the domestic market, entering new
sectors with greater potentialities of growth (the telecommunication and gas ones) and moving into
new geographical markets, especially in Latin America. For what concerns the principal activity,
the company tried to increase its efficiency, pursuing the aim to strengthen its own presence in the
ownership of the greatest competitors (as happened with Sevillana de Electricidad, in which it was
the major stockholder in 2000 with 39,9%49) and above all, it aimed at internationalization: the
activity of the enterprise at the end of 1998 concerned European countries, Morocco and Latin
American States, in which it maintained a leading position. The strategy of diversification of the
activity instead, focused itself on the sectors with greater perspectives of growth and in which it was
possible to exploit sinergies, as suggested by Chandler. In 1996, ENDESA and the Banco Central
Hispano signed an ambitious industrial plan, formalizing a series of joined sharing. In 1998, a
company (ENDESA Diversificación) was established inside the group that included the secondary
lines of product: gas, telecommunications (Auna for the fixed telephony, Auna-Amena for mobile,
Retevision - Auna Audiovisual and in minority Hispasat, Euskaltel, Tenaria), water and renewable
energy.
IBERDROLA, born in 1992 from the merger of the two electric companies Iberduero and
Hidroeléctrica Española, was, at the end of the last century, in second place in the electric energy
sector in Spain. Its greatest shareholder was the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya and the other shares were
largely spread. Just like ENDESA, also Iberdrola made diversification its greatest tool of growth,
strengthening its principal activity and focusing its own diversification of geographical market on
Latin America, but above all, creating an ample group active in the energy sector, in the engineering
and counselling one, in real estate, in telecommunications and in clientele services50. Also in this
case a virtuous circle was created among the increase of resources, that allowed the diversification
of market and product, and the further surplus coming from diversification, that this strategy once
more permitted.
Another group of great success excluded by the sample, is that of the construction and public works
enterprises which, also during the economic opening of the country, were able to protect themselves
effectively from the competition, thanks to their experience and their knowledge in the management
of relationships with political authorities, who gave the authorizations and the concessions often
preferring national enterprises to foreign ones. In this way they strengthened, succeeded in
internationalizing obtaining numerous charges for the construction of public works in foreign
“Endesa”, in P. Nueno, Las 49 empresas con más futuro, cit., p. 109
Ibidem, p. 106
50
“Grupo Iberdrola, la diversificación como objetivo”, in F. Mochón and A. Rambla, La creación de valor y las
grandes empresas españolas, cit.
48
49
24
countries and they diversified throughout the employment of profits coming from the new
geographical markets. The firm of constructions Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas, for
instance, in the year 2002, operated in almost all Europe, in America and in some Africans States.
Its production was for 53% unrelated to the native sector: it placed side by side to the main strategic
area an intense activity in other fields among which real estate, climatization, vehicle marketing,
computer systems, mobile telephony and insurances51.
A last example of success belongs to the commercial sector: El Corte Inglés was initially simply a
large scale retail trade company. Today it has been able to create around itself a real industrial
group that includes, apart from the group leader, other important enterprises like: Hipercor (net of
shopping malls), Viajes El Corte Inglés (tourism), Informática El Corte Inglés (distribution of
computer products and related services), Telecor (distribution and service assistance on
telecommunications), Investrónica (manufacturing and I.T. distribution), Editorial Centro de
Estudios Ramón Areces (scientific publications), CESS El Corte Inglés (insurances, assets
mangement, real estate), Seguros El Corte Inglés (insurances), Financiera El Corte Inglés (group
financial firm), Opencor (distribution 365 days a year), Supercor (net of supermarkets), Sfera
(clothing and accessories production and distribution).
These great companies constitute only an example of the spectacular growth that invested the non
industrial sectors, and that allowed the firms protagonist to accumulate resources and develop in
rising sectors according to the prescriptions of economic rationality that the chandlerian enterprises
had indentified in the industrial area during the twentieth century. The relative decline of the
industrial sectors towards the ending of the century in comparison to these new opportunities and
the failure of the late industrial countries in catching up with the nations that already had
accumulated an inextinguishable discrepancy since the Postwar period, has probably prevented the
good results of the initiatives of growth and diversification in this field, suggesting the
entrepreneurs to surrender their enterprises to the big foreign competitors in order to permit their
survival. This failure on the other hand, could have represented, at least in Spain, a strong incentive
to invest especially in the companies of the always less emerging services sector, that developed
moving with success into industrial and non industrial activities, on the domestic and foreign
market.
51
Fomento de construcciones y contratas, Informe Anual, 2002
25
APPENDIX
Main sector and strategy of the 100 largest industrial firms, 1983
GROUP
INH
INI
ENTERPRISE
LARGEST SECTOR OF
ACTIVITY
TURNOVER
(million of
pesetas)
ERT
STRATEGY
PUBLIC
DOMINANT BUSINESS
PUBLIC
UNRELATED BUSINESS
CAMPSA
PETROLEUM
1.299.713
ENPETROL
HISPANOIL
BUTANO
PETROLÍBER
ENIEPSA
PETROLEUM
PETROLEUM
PETROLEUM
PETROLEUM
PETROLEUM
605.675
143.407
130.140
119.648
34.390
ASFALTOS
ESPAÑOLES
PETROLEUM
32.532
ALCUDIA
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
27.580
CALATRAVA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICAL
23.613
ENSIDESA
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
150.353
SEAT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
146.796
EN BAZÁN
SHIPBUIDING INDUSTRY
76.382
EN
AUTOCAMIONES
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
75.147
ASTILLEROS
ESPAÑOLES
SHIPBUILDING
INDUSTRY
63.851
HUNOSA
MINING INDUSTRY
48.606
ALUMINIO
ESPAÑOL
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
44.539
EN DI THE
ALUMINIO
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
44.013
OLEAGINOSAS
ESPAÑOLAS
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
42.138
CASA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
40.158
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
28.603
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
28.529
ALUMINIO DE
GALICIA
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
26.480
EN DE
CELULOSAS
PAPER
25.696
EN DE
FERTILIZANTES
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
24.837
MAQUINISTA
TERRESTRE Y
MARÍTIMA
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
22.240
BABCOCK &
WILCOX
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
18.297
CEPSA
PETROLEUM
448.900
PRIVATEBANKING
PETROQUÍMICA
ESPAÑOLA
EXPLOSIVOS
RÍO
TINTO
RÍO TINTO
MINERA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
18.102
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
187.836
PRIVATEBANKING
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
44.429
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
ALTOS HORNOS
DEL
MEDITERRANEA
NEO
ALÚMINA
ESPAÑOLA
CEPSA
OWNERSHIP
26
DOMINANT BUSINESS
UNRELATED BUSINESS
RÍO RÓDANO
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
20.347
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
FASA RENAULT
FASA RENAULT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
205.964
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
TABACALERA
TABACALERA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
152.928
PUBLIC
UNRELATED BUSINESS
FORD ESPAÑA
FORD ESPAÑA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
136.691
FOR (USA)
###
GENERAL
MOTORS ESPAÑA
GENERAL
MOTORS
ESPAÑA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
129.842
FOR. (USA)
###
PETROMED
PETROMED
PETROLEUM
107.021
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
CITROËN ESPAÑA
CITROËN
ESPAÑA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
88.900
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
ALTOS HORNOS
DE VIZCAYA
ALTOS HORNOS
DE VIZCAYA
83.744
PRIVATEBANKING
DOMINANT BUSINESS
IBM
IBM
78.772
FOR. (USA)
###
MICHELIN
MICHELIN
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
75.101
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
DOW CHEMICAL
DOW CHEMICAL
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
71.684
FOR. (SWISS)
###
NESTLÉ
NESTLÉ
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
61.658
FOR. (SWISS)
###
CINDASA
CINDASA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
60.271
FOR. (USA)
###
TALBOT
TALBOT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
55.446
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
NISSAN
NISSAN
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
50.767
FOR. (JAPAN)
###
TRANSÁFRICA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
24.210
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
URALITA
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
24.007
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
STANDARD
ELÈCTRICA
STANDARD
ELÈCTRICA
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
47.758
FOR. (USA)
###
HOECHST IBERICA
HOECHST
IBERICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
46.550
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
GRUPO MARCH
UNRELATED BUSINESS
SHELL
SHELL
PETROLEUM
43.684
FOR. (UK)
###
FIRESTONE
HISPANIA
FIRESTONE
HISPANIA
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
37.735
FOR. (UK)
###
DISTRIBUIDORA
INDUSTRIAL
DISTRIBUIDORA
INDUSTRIAL
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
35.547
PUBLIC
RELATED BUSINESS
KOIPE
KOIPE
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
34.705
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
CROS
CROS
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
33.826
PRIVATEDIFFUSED
UNRELATED BUSINESS
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
32.312
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
32.000
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
S.E. METALES
PRECIOSOS
MERCEDES
BENZ
ESPAÑOLA
S.E. METALES
PRECIOSOS
ELOSÚA
ELOSÚA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
31.938
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
NANTA
NANTA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
30.292
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
DANONE
DANONE
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
28.000
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
ACEITERÍAS
REUN. LEVANTE
ACEITERÍAS
REUN. LEVANTE
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
27.864
FOR. (USA)
###
PRODUCTOS
PIRELLI
PRODUCTOS
PIRELLI
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
27.036
STR. (ITALY)
###
MERCEDES BENZ
ESPAÑOLA
27
ACERINOX
ACERINOX
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
26.773
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
ASLAND
ASLAND
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
26.462
PRIVATEDIFFUSED
SINGLE BUSINESS
BASF ESPAÑOLA
BASF ESPAÑOLA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
26.312
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
CRISTALERÍA
ESPAÑOLA
CRISTALERÍA
ESPAÑOLA
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
25.871
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
COMPAÑÍA
INDUSTRIAS
AGRÌCOLAS
COMPAÑÍA
INDUSTRIAS
AGRÍCOLAS
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
25.705
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
PASCUAL DE
ARANDA
PASCUAL DE
ARANDA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
25.500
PRIVATEFAMILY
RELATED BUSINESS
ROCA
RADIADORES
ROCA
RADIADORES
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
25.051
PRIVATEFAMILY
RELATED BUSINESS
LA SEDA DE
BARCELONA
LA SEDA DE
BARCELONA
TEXTILES AND APPAREL
24.622
FOR.
(HOLLAND)
###
CAMP
CAMP
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
24.433
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
GENERAL
AZUCARERA
GENERAL
AZUCARERA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
24.350
PRIVATEBANKING
RELATED BUSINESS
AGROPECUARIA
DE GUISSONA
AGROPECUARIA
DE GUISSONA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
23.996
PRIVATECOOPERATIVE
SINGLE BUSINESS
SARRIÓ
SARRIÓ
PAPER
23.970
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
LAMPARAS
ELÉCTRICAS" Z"
LAMPARAS
ELÉCTRICAS" Z"
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
23.755
FOR.
(HOLLAND)
###
SOLVAY
SOLVAY
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
23.700
FOR.
(BELGIUM)
###
ASTURIANA DE
ZINC
ATURIANA DE
ZINC
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
23.586
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
HENKEL IBÉRICA
HENKEL
IBÉRICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
23.573
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
CARBONELL
CARBONELL
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
23.400
PRIVATEBANKING
RELATED BUSINESS
EBRO, COMPAÑÍA
DE AZÚCARES Y
ALCOHOLES
EBRO,
COMPAÑÍA DE
AZÚCARES Y
ALCOHOLES
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
23.366
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
VALENCIANA DE
CEMENTOS
VALENCIANA
DE CEMENTOS
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
22.956
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
ACEITE Y
PROTEINAS
ACEITE Y
PROTEINAS
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
22.869
PRIVATEDIFFUSED
SINGLE BUSINESS
FEMSA
FEMSA
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
22.260
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
EL ÁGUILA
EL ÁGUILA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
22.166
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
SIEMENS
SIEMENS
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
22.081
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
PROMP
PROMP
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
22.000
PRIVATE
RELATED BUSINESS
MINIWATT
MINIWATT
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
20.775
FOR.
(HOLLAND)
###
FORET
FORET
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
20.764
FOR. (USA)
###
28
NUEVA MONTAÑA
QUIJANO
NUEVA
MONTAÑA
QUIJANO
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
20.159
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
CIBA-GEIGY
CIBA-GEIGY
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
20.054
FOR. (SWISS)
###
LAND ROVER
SANTANA
LAND ROVER
SANTANA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
19.664
FOR. (JAPAN)
###
COOPERATIVAS
ORENSANAS
COOPERATIVAS
ORENSANAS
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
19.549
PRIVATECOOPERATIVE
SINGLE BUSINESS
OSCAR MAYER
OSCAR MAYER
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
19.405
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
JOSÉ MARÍA
ARISTRAÍN
JOSÉ MARÍA
ARISTRAÍN
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
19.235
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
HISPANO
OLIVETTI
HISPANO
OLIVETTI
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
18.922
FOR. (ITALY)
###
TARRAGONA
QUÍMICA
TARRAGONA
QUÍMICA
18.800
NATIONAL
SINGLE BUSINESS
IBERCOBRE
IBERCOBRE
18.676
NATIONAL
SINGLE BUSINESS
ULGOR
ULGOR
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
18.671
PRIVATECOOPERATIVE
SINGLE BUSINESS
LEVER IBERICA
LEVER IBERICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
18.500
FOR. (UK)
###
ABENGOA
MONTAJES
ELÉCTS.
ABENGOA
MONTAJES
ELÉCTS.
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
18.111
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
TORRAS
HERRERÍA
TORRAS
HERRERÍA
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
17.755
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
Main sector and strategy of the 100 largest industrial firms, 1993
GROUP
INH
ENTERPRISE
SECTOR
TURNOVER
(million of
pesetas)
REPSOL
COMERCIAL
PETROLEUM
1.214.232
REPSOL
PETROLEO
PETROLEUM
634.536
PETRONOR
PETROLEUM
187.215
REPSOL
BUTANO
PETROLEUM
173.197
CLH
PETROLEUM
89.148
REPSOL
QUÍMICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
86.253
ENSIDESA
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
175.645
CASA
ALTOS HORNOS
DE VIZCAYA
INI
ASTILLEROS
ESPAÑOLES
EN BAZÁN
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
SHIPBUILDING
INDUSTRY
SHIPBUILDING
INDUSTRY
OWNERSHIP
STRATEGY
PUBLIC
DOMINANT BUSINESS
PUBLIC
UNRELATED BUSINESS
118.932
108.200
61.514
55.811
RÍO TINTO
MINERA
MINING INDUSTRY
47.526
"INI"
VARIOUS ACTIVITIES
46.424
BABCOCK &
WILCOX
ESPAÑOLA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
39.721
29
ALUMINIO
ESPAÑOL
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
38.037
ACENOR
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
27.653
PAPER
25.754
ENCE
VOLKSWAGEN
AUDI
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
GEARBOX DEL
PRAT
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
23.828
TABACALERA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
625.675
LACTARÍA
ESPAÑOLA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
35.544
CEPSA
PETROLEUM
475.292
PRIVATEBANKING
ERTOIL
PETROLEUM
98.218
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
CEPSA
ESTACIONES DE
SERVICIO
PETROLEUM
42.084
PRIVATEENTERPRISE
FASA RENAULT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
482.928
VEHICULOS
INDUSTRIALES
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
28.500
GENERAL MOTORS
ESPAÑA
GENERAL
MOTORS
ESPAÑA
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
FORD ESPAÑA
FORD ESPAÑA
CITROËN HISPANIA
CITROËN
HISPANIA
IBM
IBM
NISSAN MOTOR
IBÉRICA
NISSAN MOTOR
IBÉRICA
PEUGEUT TALBOT
SEAT
VOLKSWAGEN
AUDI
TABACALERA
CEPSA
FASA RENAULT
548.446
192.511
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
PUBLIC
UNRELATED BUSINESS
DOMINANT BUSINESS
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
465.756
FOR. (USA)
###
353.633
FOR. (USA)
###
305.214
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
219.520
FOR. (USA)
###
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
190.324
FOR. (JAPAN)
###
PEUGEUT
TALBOT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
185.379
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
NEUMÁTICOS
MICHELIN
NEUMÁTICOS
MICHELIN
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
152.572
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
NESTLÉ
NESTLÉ
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
152.201
FOR. (SWISS)
###
BP OIL
BP OIL
PETROLEUM
136.022
FOR. (UK)
###
BAYER
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
48.050
BAYER
QUÍMICA
FARMACÉUTICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
38.915
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
AGFA GEVAERT
VARIOUS ACTIVITIES
27.634
MERCEDES-BENZ
MERCEDESBENZ
103.141
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
ROBERT BOSCH
ROBERT BOSCH
84.719
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
EBRO AGRICOLAS
EBRO
AGRICOLAS
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
81.219
FOR. (KUWAIT)
###
DANONE
DANONE
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
80.776
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
DOW CHEMICAL
IBÉRICA
DOW CHEMICAL
IBÉRICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
80.057
FOR. (SWISS)
###
ACERINOX
ACERINOX
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
79.812
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
BAYER
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
30
SHELL ESPAÑA
SHELL ESPAÑA
PETROLEUM
78.979
FOR. (UK)
###
HENKEL IBÉRICA
HENKEL
IBÉRICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
76.630
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
CRISTALERÍA
ESPAÑOLA
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
43.446
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
VICASA
32.616
AGRA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
38.662
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
FOR. (UK)
###
LEVER ESPAÑA
33.168
IVECO PEGASO
IVECO PEGASO
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
69.841
FOR. (ITALY)
###
CRUZCAMPO
CRUZCAMPO
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
68.567
FOR. (UK)
###
HOECHST IBÉRICA
HOECHST
IBÉRICA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
67.372
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
CARGILL ESPAÑA
CARGILL
ESPAÑA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
63.799
FOR. (USA)
###
SIEMENS
SIEMENS
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
58.590
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
HEWLETT
PACKARD
ESPAÑOLA
BRIDGESTONE
FIRESTONE
ESPAÑOLA
HEWLETT
PACKARD
ESPAÑOLA
BRIDGESTONE
FIRESTONE
ESPAÑOLA
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
58.523
FOR. (USA)
###
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
58.249
FOR. (USA)
###
ACEPROSA
ACEPROSA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
49.715
FOR. (BRAZIL)
###
TOTAL ESPAÑA
TOTAL ESPAÑA
PETROLEUM
49.578
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
PROCTER &
GAMBLE
PROCTER &
GAMBLE
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
48.924
FOR. (SWISS)
###
AGROPECUARIA
DE GUISSONA
AGROPECUARIA
DE GUISSONA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
48.659
PRIVATECOOPERATIVE
SINGLE BUSINESS
SANTANA-MOTOR
SANTANAMOTOR
TRANSPORATION
EQUIPMENT
48.516
FOR. (JAPAN)
###
EL ÁGUILA
EL ÁGUILA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
47.373
FOR.
(HOLLAND)
###
GENERAL
AZUCARERA
ESPAÑOLA
GENERAL
AZUCARERA
ESPAÑOLA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
46.667
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
PESCANOVA
PESCANOVA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
46.225
PRIVATE
RELATED BUSINESS
ZARDOYA OTIS
ZARDOYA OTIS
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
41.058
FOR. (USA)
###
ALBILUX
ALBILUX
ELECTRONICS AND
ELECTRICAL
EQUIPMENT
40.931
FOR. (SWEDEN)
###
PETROGAL
ESPAÑOLA
PETROGAL
ESPAÑOLA
PETROLEUM
40.028
FOR.
(PORTUGAL)
###
KOIPE
KOIPE
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
39.571
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
SARRIÓ
SARRIÓ
38.658
FOR. (KUWAIT)
###
RANK XEROX
RANK XEROX
37.643
FOR. (UK)
###
CIBA-GEIGY
CIBA-GEIGY
36.522
FOR. (SWISS)
###
ASTURIANA DE
ZINC
ASTURIANA DE
ZINC
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
36.128
PRIVATEBANKING
SINGLE BUSINESS
SAN MIGUEL
SAN MIGUEL
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
36.069
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
BENKISER
BENKISER
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
35.058
FOR.
(GERMANY)
###
CRISTALERÍA
ESPAÑOLA
UNILEVER ESPAÑA
PAPER
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
31
OLIVETTI ESPAÑA
OLIVETTI
ESPAÑA
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
33.777
FOR. (ITALY)
###
CENTRAL
LECHERA
ASTURIANA
CENTRAL
LECHERA
ASTURIANA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
33.579
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
BIMBO
BIMBO
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
31.656
FOR. (USA)
###
MARCIAL UCÍN
MARCIAL UCÍN
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
31.643
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
DAMM
DAMM
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
30.813
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
PULEVA-UNIASA
PULEVAUNIASA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
30.569
PRIVATE
DOMINANT BUSINESS
PRODUCTOS
CAPILARES
PRODUCTOS
CAPILARES
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
30.097
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
OMSA
OMSA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
28.899
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
CARBUROS
METÁLICOS
CARBUROS
METÁLICOS
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
28.164
PRIVATEBANKING
RELATED BUSINESS
S.E. METALES
PRECIOSOS
S.E. METALES
PRECIOSOS
MECHANICALS AND
METALS
27.524
FOR. (FRANCE)
###
ERCROS
ERCROS
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
27.020
FOR. (KUWAIT)
###
MOBIL OIL
MERK SHARP &
DHOME
MOBIL OIL
SNACK
VENTURES
EUROPE
MERK SHARP &
DHOME
GLAXO
GLAXO
ESSO
PETROLEUM
26.705
FOR. (USA)
###
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
26.639
FOR. (USA)
###
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
26.536
FOR. (USA)
###
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
26.302
FOR. (UK)
###
ESSO
PETROLEUM
26.094
FOR. (USA)
###
COPAGA
COPAGA
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
25.944
PRIVATE-COO
SINGLE BUSINESS
3M ESPAÑA
3M ESPAÑA
25.778
FOR. (USA)
###
URALITA
URALITA
25.528
PRIVATE
RELATED BUSINESS
ANTIBIÓTICOS
ANTIBIÓTICOS
25.153
FOR. (ITALY)
###
PIRELLI
NEUMÁTICOS
PIRELLI
NEUMÁTICOS
RUBBER AND PLASTIC
MATERIAL
24.537
FOR. (ITALY)
###
LABORATORIOS
ALMIRALL
LABORATORIOS
ALMIRALL
FUJITSU
ESPAÑA
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
ALIMENTARY, DRINKS
AND TOBACCO
23.283
PRIVATE
SINGLE BUSINESS
22.529
FOR. (JAPAN)
###
22.337
PRIVATEFAMILY
SINGLE BUSINESS
SNACK VENTURES
EUROPE
FUJITSU ESPAÑA
CODORNÍU
CODORNÍU
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
STONE, CLAY AND
GLASS
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
32
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