May I ask if the market concentration is low and the competition must be fierce? If an industry is just in the early stage of growth, can't low concentration mean fierce competition? thank you

Although the impact of e-commerce on social and economic life is very significant, the real impact is achieved through the impact on the basic economic unit-enterprises. The impact of e-commerce on traditional information transmission methods and commodity trading methods is only a representation of its influence. More importantly, it will cause great changes in the business environment of enterprises, profoundly affect the competitive pattern of many industries, and further affect the competitive strategy and the way to realize the strategy. Next, the author will analyze in detail the influence and mechanism of e-commerce on various elements of industry competition structure, as well as the changes in enterprise strategy and industry structure brought about by it. First, the bargaining power of customers has been significantly enhanced. As the saying goes, buying is not as good as selling. This sentence describes the information asymmetry in the transaction well. For a long time, enterprises have been in an information advantage position in the transaction process. Even in the era of surplus economy dominated by the buyer's market, the seller's enterprise is still the leader of the transaction. The establishment of this dominant position of enterprises is based on the fact that most consumers, as the main buyers, have very limited understanding of the basic information of products, and consumers are almost isolated and rarely communicate. Using this information barrier, enterprises can maintain high profits and relatively stable market. The main way to improve consumers' information status is to strengthen the alliance and communication between consumers. Although there are spontaneous organizations such as consumer associations to achieve this goal under the traditional economic conditions, the role of these organizations is very limited because of the high information cost. In the e-commerce environment, information transmission is more convenient, cheaper and faster, and the pace of communication and alliance between consumers is greatly accelerated. Many virtual communities on the Internet are more or less related to some products or services, so every consumer can participate in the exchange of a little information, and the final result is that every consumer can easily obtain more comprehensive product information. Driven by various interests, community hosts often seek the assistance of various professional forces to make the information obtained by consumers more accurate and detailed. Therefore, many virtual communities have naturally evolved into spontaneous or for-profit consumer groups. The popularity of e-commerce has also brought some new information platforms. These platforms provide real-time classified commodity information and carry out large-scale information processing, which greatly reduces the cost of information search. For large demand, many websites also provide reverse auction, group purchase and other ways to participate in the transaction on behalf of consumers, further improving the status of consumers in the transaction. Therefore, although e-commerce has not completely eliminated information asymmetry, it has greatly reduced the degree of asymmetry. With the development of e-commerce, buyers have risen rapidly as a powerful force, and the ability of enterprises to obtain extra profits by virtue of information advantages will be greatly weakened. For most industries, the traditional seller-centered model will gradually change, and the bargaining power between enterprises and customers will be significantly reduced, which will eventually affect the overall business environment of the industry. Enterprises will have to compete more fiercely in order to maintain their market position. Second, the diversification of enterprise competition methods Under the traditional economic conditions, the competition between enterprises is mainly based on the competition of scale benefits. Once the scale advantage is established, it is difficult for other enterprises to challenge it. According to Porter's competitive strategy theory, in a mature market, enterprises of all sizes will form different strategic groups, and each strategic groups has different market level positioning, thus keeping the whole industry structure relatively stable. There is a great possibility of fierce competition between competitors in the same strategic groups; However, fierce competition rarely breaks out between enterprises in different strategic groups. Only when the market develops at a high speed will enterprises participate in all-round competition regardless of scale. Under the traditional economic conditions, due to poor information dissemination, even if small-scale enterprises have gained advantages over large enterprises in some aspects, they cannot occupy the market and grow in a short time, while large enterprises can catch up with them calmly. However, the emergence of e-commerce has broken this competition mode, and the industry competition has changed from "big fish eat small fish" to "fast fish eat slow fish", that is, from a simple dispute over scale benefits to a competition mode that pays equal attention to speed benefits and scale benefits. Due to the rapid spread of information, the response speed of the market is also obviously accelerated, and leading product and service innovations can be quickly accepted by the market. Coupled with some favorable external factors, such as changes in market demand, shortened product life cycle, increasingly convenient financing conditions, diversified sales channels, etc., an enterprise that can quickly respond to market demand and changes and innovate high-quality and low-price products can expand rapidly and occupy the market; If large enterprises only imitate and do not innovate, they will gradually be eliminated by the market. Therefore, with the introduction of e-commerce, the role of enterprise scale in enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises has obviously declined. It can be seen that e-commerce provides a stage for all enterprises to compete in an all-round way. Small enterprises can rise rapidly by virtue of their outstanding advantages in one aspect and challenge the status of large enterprises. Because of this "one move fresh" chance of winning, the competitive pattern of the industry will no longer be as stable as before, especially the position of the leader is more difficult to maintain. In such a competitive environment, only enterprises committed to continuous innovation can be in an invincible position for a long time. Third, the circulation link has been greatly compressed. Circulation is a crucial link in traditional economy, and distribution networks at different levels are the dual carriers of goods and information. E-commerce started from the field of circulation. With the popularity of e-commerce, the importance of circulation has not changed, but it is facing great changes. The rapid transmission of information and the global distribution network no longer need multi-layer intermediate distributors, and direct sales or primary channels will become the main distribution methods, and the simplification trend of circulation links is inevitable. Circulation is of great significance to the choice of enterprise's competitive strategy, and controlling distribution channels is one of the most important competitive strategies of traditional enterprises. As we all know, it takes a lot of manpower and material resources and a long time to establish a large-scale distribution channel, and once this channel is established, it will become an important resource. Many large enterprises use their own distribution networks to control the customer base and prevent competitors from entering. In the e-commerce environment, great changes have taken place in the circulation mode, the time and cost of establishing a distribution network have been greatly reduced, and the channel monopoly no longer exists, which means that the channel resources have been greatly depreciated. Regional and global distribution network is the development trend of circulation field in e-commerce environment, which also means that the competition of enterprises will break through geographical boundaries and meet hand in hand. In the past, geographical distance used to be a strong barrier for many weak enterprises, and the general products all had obvious geographical distribution, which is the so-called "strong dragons don't crush local snakes". However, with the implementation of e-commerce and the free flow of production factors such as personnel, capital and information, the ability of enterprises to operate across regions and even across borders has gradually increased, and the geographical barrier is no longer insurmountable, so vulnerable enterprises can no longer rely on geographical location to settle down. This feature of e-commerce is a typical Matthew effect, and the possibility of dominant enterprises forming a "winner takes all" situation in a certain region is greatly increased. For most industries, the industry concentration will increase rapidly, or even form a monopoly or oligopoly situation, and enterprises will be polarized between the strong and the weak. Fourthly, virtual procurement has changed the management mode of supply chain. Procurement is one of the important activities of enterprises and an important part of industrial value chain. In the past, in order to maintain the stability of production, many enterprises established long-term supplier relationships at the expense of preferential prices. The popularity of e-commerce, especially the wide application of BtoB model, provides a virtual and borderless platform for transactions between enterprises. Therefore, the relationship between enterprises and suppliers becomes more subtle, and the master-slave relationship between supply and demand becomes clearer. According to the different status of both parties, virtual procurement usually has three forms. In the buyer-led supply relationship, virtual procurement usually adopts the way of bidding, which reduces the buyer's dependence on long-term partners and increases the bargaining power of enterprises. In the supply relationship dominated by the seller, the form similar to auction is generally adopted, so that the seller can get the highest income. The third form is the virtual market established by the third party. This form often exists in the supply and demand relationship between many buyers and sellers. The status of the two parties is roughly the same, and the pricing model is similar to the traditional market. The main purpose is to simplify the procurement process and reduce the information cost. It can be seen that the relationship between supply and demand under e-commerce also presents the Matthew effect that the strong are stronger and the weak are weaker. Although both the supply and demand sides have enjoyed the benefits brought by the reduction of information costs, the benefits obtained are not equal. Under the e-commerce model, the bargaining power of the dominant party in the relationship between supply and demand has been enhanced, while the status of the subordinate party has been weakened. Because most of the markets in modern economy are dominated by buyers, the bargaining power of enterprises to suppliers has been generally enhanced. E-commerce has increased the feasibility of virtual manufacturing, which appeared as early as 1970s. The most typical enterprise is Nike. The so-called virtual manufacturing means that the company itself is mainly responsible for product design and market development, and almost all production links are outsourced. Therefore, virtual manufacturing is essentially another form of supplier relationship. Because there is no need to bear huge production investment, virtual manufacturing enterprises have flexible mechanism, sensitive response to market demand and strong adaptability. However, this mode of operation also has a fatal weakness, that is, it requires the company to have super information processing ability and can quickly coordinate marketing, product development and production activities distributed all over the world. In the traditional information environment, this means huge management costs. Only a large enterprise like Nike can use the excess profits brought by brand advantages as a support, which ordinary enterprises can't afford. Therefore, although Nike's virtual manufacturing has long been famous, there are few imitators. The appearance of Internet and e-commerce greatly reduces the time and cost of information transmission, storage and processing, thus opening up a good prospect for the universal application of virtual manufacturing. This is because the reduction of collaboration cost can enable enterprises to focus on their best industrial links and hand over the weak links to other enterprises for collaboration, thus improving operational efficiency. Therefore, the development of virtual manufacturing will inevitably lead to the reconfiguration of industrial resources and the re-integration of industrial value chain, the degree of specialization within the industry will be higher, and the efficiency of the industrial chain will also be improved. Obviously, for traditional enterprises that advocate big and complete, small and complete, virtual manufacturing puts forward higher requirements for the structure of enterprise manufacturing system. Enterprises must focus on their own advantages and quickly find their position in the industrial chain, otherwise they will face the embarrassing situation of "everything is easy". The change of trade barriers of intransitive verbs Due to the rapid spread of information, the sharp reduction of circulation links and the gradual disappearance of geographical restrictions, many people predict that e-commerce will make enterprises enter the era of "borderless competition", thinking that the boundaries of industries will become looser or even disappear, and enterprises will have more freedom in market selection (Thomas M. Siebel //Athouse//999). On the surface, the restrictions on enterprises entering and exiting a market are indeed much less, and the industry barriers seem to be significantly reduced. However, it is this "borderless competition" that makes the entry threshold of most industries rise instead. Because although the access restrictions are less, the advantages of the pioneers have expanded. Enterprises with advantages can cover the whole market, leaving little room for other enterprises to survive. Only when new entrants surpass existing competitors can they gain a firm foothold in the industry. Therefore, although the entrants with advantages can quickly occupy a place in the market, it is more difficult for the new entrants who cannot surpass the existing competitors to share a piece of the action. There is a famous saying in the online world: "There is only the first, but there is no second", which shows that in the e-commerce environment, there is no way out for pure imitation without innovation. Different from entry barriers, exit barriers generally show a downward trend. Due to the application of e-commerce, the initial investment of enterprises based on a market is obviously reduced, and the cost of withdrawing from the market is relatively small, so it will not be difficult to give up. This opposite trend of entry barriers and exit barriers will eventually lead to the improvement of industry concentration. Seven. The change of the overall external environment of enterprises, the popularity of e-commerce not only profoundly affects the implementation of enterprise strategy at the level of industry structure, but also gradually changes the overall external environment of enterprises. Because e-commerce can provide personalized and all-weather services, it can be predicted that in the near future, online media will become one of the main ways for customers to buy, and enterprises have to keep up with the pace of e-commerce if they want to occupy the market. A series of economic service departments and government affairs such as financial system, logistics and distribution are gradually networked, which provides a foundation for enterprises to carry out e-commerce. With the gradual popularization of the Internet, enterprises without "touching the net" will gradually show the contrast with the external environment. The e-commerce of other enterprises, especially those in the same industry, has caused these enterprises to retreat if they don't advance, prompting them to speed up the process of e-commerce. From the previous discussion, we can see that e-commerce not only simply changes the traditional information transmission mode and transaction mode, but also profoundly affects the market pattern and industry competition pattern of enterprises. E-commerce has greatly changed the strength of market participants, changed the living environment of enterprises and created the opportunity of "shuffling". For enterprises, this is both an opportunity for rapid development and a life-and-death challenge. Therefore, how to make clear the impact of e-commerce on the traditional economy, grasp the development direction of e-commerce, and then correctly formulate the competitive strategy of enterprises in the new environment is an important topic faced by all enterprises.