Under the background of the decline of real estate investment and infrastructure construction investment, the domestic cement industry is facing unprecedented challenges.
Data show that in the first half of this year, the national cement output dropped by 10.68% compared with the same period last year, and the whole industry suffered a loss of about 1.2 billion yuan. In such a market environment, different enterprises have adopted different market strategies, trying to find their own way to survive in the fierce competition.
1. Synergist:
The enterprises of the Synergist hope to stabilize the market price by coordinating production restriction, thereby improving the profits of the enterprises.
They believe that in the overall decline in market demand, reducing excess capacity is the key to stabilizing the market and improving the overall profitability of the industry. In addition, the Synergy Group also tends to increase industry concentration through mergers and acquisitions, and further reduce ineffective and backward production capacity.
This approach aims to phase out backward production capacity, ease the pressure of supply and demand, and achieve a smooth "landing" of the cement industry under the background of shrinking market demand through integration within the industry. However, the disadvantage of this approach is that it may lead to serious overcapacity problems for a long time.
Second, the market school: the survival
of the fittest market school enterprises advocate the elimination of backward production capacity through market competition.
In their view, "long pain is better than short pain", the reduction of market demand is a natural screening process, only those enterprises that can adapt to market changes and have strong competitiveness can survive.
Marketers tend to seize market share by reducing costs and expanding sales channels, forcing those enterprises that can not adapt to market competition to withdraw from the market. In the short run, this strategy will intensify market competition, cause large-scale losses in the industry, bankrupt a large number of enterprises, aggravate bad debts and employment problems of banks, but in the long run, it will help to improve the quality and efficiency of the whole industry.
Some enterprises have adopted the so-called "two-faced" strategy, that is, on the surface, they support the initiative of coordinating production restriction, but in fact, they secretly increase production and adopt price war and other competitive means to compete for market share. The biggest drawback of
this approach is to reduce mutual trust in the industry, resulting in increased difficulty in market coordination. It may gain a certain market share in the short term, but it destroys the stability of the market and is not conducive to the healthy development of the industry. In the long run, this strategy may lead the industry into a vicious cycle of competition and affect the sustainable development of the whole industry.
To strengthen industry self-discipline and prevent "involution" vicious competition
, facing the severe market situation, the cement industry needs to find a way to meet the current challenges and promote long-term development. At the meeting of the Political Bureau of
the CPC Central Committee on July 30, it was pointed out that "industry self-discipline should be strengthened to prevent vicious competition of involution.". Strengthen the mechanism of survival of the fittest in the market and smooth the exit channels of backward and inefficient production capacity.
In the current context, the cement industry to strengthen industry self-discipline, promote technological innovation, optimize the industrial structure, improve service quality will be the key to the industry out of the predicament.
