Yu Lin, Biwei Liang and Xuechang Zhu
The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship among inventory performance, financial performance (FP) and product quality.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship among inventory performance, financial performance (FP) and product quality.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical analysis is based on two-stage least squares analysis of detailed firm-transaction data from Chinese manufacturing export firms for the period between 2001 and 2013.
Findings
Results show that inventory performance has a positive impact on product quality while using inventory efficiency, inventory productivity and inventory leanness to measure inventory performance. Furthermore, the effect of inventory performance on product quality is found to be partially mediated by FP.
Practical implications
The research provides mangers evidence of the benefits of inventory performance as an antecedent of product quality. Managers without sufficient liquidity or cost advantage to get better FP can achieve product quality improvement through enhancing inventory management performance.
Originality/value
This study first empirically investigates the relationship between inventory performance and product quality, and examines the mediating effect of FP on this relationship.
Details
Keywords
Shunqi Hou, Xiaoyu Wang, Jingjing Xiao, Yurui Zhang and Feiyang Cheng
The new Silk Road provides cross-border-e-commerce firms with an opportunity to widen their markets. Under this circumstance, the preference recognition of countries and inventory…
Abstract
The new Silk Road provides cross-border-e-commerce firms with an opportunity to widen their markets. Under this circumstance, the preference recognition of countries and inventory allocation among overseas warehouses both become critical issues to solve. Three Chinese smartphone brands, including HTC, Huawei, and MI, are selected in this chapter for their relatively enormous sales. DHgate and AliExpress websites are chosen as platforms to analyze the sales for data availability. This chapter first depicts key features of the sales and then, based on which, divide countries into several groups according to their preference for phones by cluster analysis. Then, based on the results of cluster analysis, this chapter further models the inventory assignment among the seven major overseas warehouses that were built by AliExpress in 2015. The results show that the HTC seems to be pursuing the “high value with high price” strategy, while the other two companies seem to be pursuing a hybrid strategy of “low-price” strategy and “high value with low price” strategy. This chapter also provides an assignment pattern of inventory among the overseas warehouses based on the real data of sales and costs.