본 연구는 1975년 이후 설립된 이후 30년 이내에 미국의 대표적인 500대 기업 중 하나로 급성장한 44개사의 신생기업을 대상으로 이들의 경영성과가 다각화, 인수합병, 전략적 제휴, 그리고 틈새시장 공략 등과 같은 전략적 행동과 밀접한 관련을 맺고 있음을 실증분석하고자 하였다. 더불어 이상의 전략적 행동들과 동시에 기업성과에 큰 영향을 미치는 주요 요인으로써 회사고유의 경쟁력을 가늠하는 기업효과(firm effect)와 외생적인 산업효과(industry effect) 중 어느 요인이 신생기업의 성공에 더 큰 영향을 미치고 있는가에 대한 해답을 도출하였다. 패널 고정효과 분석결과 신생기업들은 그들의 초기 경쟁기업들보다 전략적 행동들을 통하여 통계적으로 유의미한 수준의 높은 주가수익률을 시현하고 있고, 그 효과는 틈새시장 공략, 비관련 다각화, 경쟁자 제거형 M&A, 기술 및 노동력 확보형 M&A, 마케팅 제휴, 그리고 제품개발 제휴 순으로 나타났다. 또한 기업효과와 산업효과 중 전략적 행동들과 연계한 회사고유의 경쟁력이 신생기업의 급속한 성장에 더 큰 영향을 미치고 있다.
This paper explores how some recently established startups have grown to be the nation’s largest firms. To pursue this issue, 1993 and 2003 Fortune 500 Indexes are compared, and firms that appeared before 1993, left the Index, and appeared back by 2003 are filtered out. Amazingly, 358 firms have newly entered the Index since 1993. Among them, 241 firms (67.2%) were originally founded as startups. The entries by firms that were originally incorporated as subsidiaries, M&As, spinoffs, and joint ventures are 53, 43, 11, and 10 firms respectively. I focus on 44 rapidly growing startups established after 1975, and I refer to these firms as “rapid-growth” startups. Through historic analysis, this paper finds that their exceptional rapid growth is highly associated with several distinctive strategic behaviors. For this purpose, post-1985 six month returns using adjusted closing stock prices and post-1985 six month sales growth rates are collected and various firm strategies are tracked by six month intervals. As a result, following strategic behaviors are considered: related and non-related diversification, M&As for acquiring technologies and skilled labor force and for removing competitors, strategic alliances for new product development and for co-marketing, and niche marketing. The performance of rapid-growth startups is compared with their early competitors’. A higher proportion of the startups is associated with the above-mentioned strategic behaviors. All the strategic behaviors have started to sharply increase since the early 1990’s, and the evolution of the strategic behaviors perfectly coincides with the expansion of the startups. A panel “startup, industry, and time” fixed effect (FE) model is constructed to test if the startups benefit more from the strategic behaviors than their competitors and to see which one between firm and industry effects plays a more important role in enhancing the performance of rapid-growth startups. As performance measures, six-month stock returns is used. According to the empirical results, non-related diversification rather than related diversification, alliance for co-marketing rather than alliance for new product development, and M&As for removing competitors rather than M&As for acquiring technologies and skilled labor force enhance the returns and sales growth of rapid-growth startups. Furthermore, their impacts on the performance measure are significantly greater for the startups compared to the competitors. The effect of niche marketing is also significant and has the largest effect among strategic behaviors. Therefore, it is evident that the rapidgrowth startups take advantage of such strategic behaviors more than their competitors do. Another important finding from the panel analysis is that firm effects, say specific competitiveness, rather than industry effects play a crucial role in shaping the exceptional growth of rapid-growth startups. This result is very meaningful because this paper is the first investigation on the firm and industry effects done with a truncated dataset including service firms. For example, McGahan (1999) used a complete set of manufacturers from Compustat to explore the topic, yielding the result that firm effects explain two thirds of the stock market performance of manufacturers. The empirical result of this study is consistent with her conclusion however, this paper can be said to generate a more robust result because landmark strategic behaviors are added in the panel estimation of firm and industry effects. There are several aspects in the paper needing emphasis. First, the top two important strategic behaviors improving the performance of rapid-growth startups are niche marketing and non-related diversification. The underlying motive of both strategic behaviors is “exploring new markets”. Entering a new market may be a risky investment, but essential to successful startups. Second, among four strategic behaviors, diversification premium or discount is probably the most controversial topic. Although it is not reported, panel FE tests using the number of SIC segments tend to produce negative impacts on the returns of both groups of firms. As Villalonga (2004) pointed out, data bias from Compustat is likely to generate diversification discount. What this study has found is that non-related diversification rather than related diversification produces positive returns. However, one needs to acknowledge that firms have a tendency to report distinguishable diversification in non-related fields while combining similar business activities into a single SIC segment. Third, this paper categorizes M&A and strategic alliance according to their purposes. My main finding is that the M&A for removing competitors in order to strengthen market leadership has a larger contribution than the one for acquiring technologies. This result is consistent with real observation where the volume of the former has started to outweigh the latter since the late 1980s. It is also interesting to see that alliance for co-marketing is more important than the one for acquiring technologies. This result is supported by the fact that more than 60% of the startups are from service industries. Summarizing, the most salient features of this paper are the findings that aggressive firm behaviors have supported top growing, recently established startups and that the analysis done with a censored data from the Fortune 500 Index roughly coincides with the predictions of previous research. Therefore, this paper concludes that firm effects originating from strategic behaviors are the fundamental sources for the exceptional success of the nation’s fastest growing startups.