General Motors and Daewoo: Married, Divorced, and Married Again

1. Are the conditions in the automobile industry facilitating or constraining an alliance strategy?

In my opinion, I think this question must be approach from the industry- based view, which would be the five forces. The automobile industry is very advanced industry which have very high entry barrier for the late movers because of special characteristics of automobile industry. First, automobile industry is connected with many other relative industries. In addition, it is a labor intensive industry which needs a lot of fixed cost and the capital for further investment. These characteristics also evoke many alliances between the relative firms in order to reduce the costs. Second, rivalry among existing firms has become very fierce in this industry since the economy started to decline. One of the wise ways to get through this crisis would be the alliance strategy.

2. In the first JV, did GM and Daewoo have the necessary relational capabilities to make the JV work?

In the first Joint venture between GM and Daewoo, I would like to say they fail to develop their relational capabilities. At the beginning, it is true that they had the relational capabilities in order to make the JV work. GM was willing to give their superior technology to upgrade Daewoo’s quality of product, and Daewoo was willing to help GM enter the small car market in both North America and Asia. However, it did not worked very well due to the poor communication. When the problems such as labor strikes and the poor quality of LeMans occurred, their efforts to overcome these problems were poor and uncooperative to each other. Daewoo argued that the poor sales were not primarily due to quality problems, but due to GM’s poor marketing efforts that had not treated the LeMans as one of GM’s own models. Further, Daewoo was