Porter's Five Forces in the German railway industry

摘要

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to investigate the profitability potential of the German railway industry. The investigation is based on a further developed Five Forces Framework of Michael E. Porter, considering different former empirical expansion proposals. In this paper, the German railway industry shall be represented by train manufacturers with production sites in Germany. The qualitative research method was chosen to evaluate the power of each of the framework forces. The consolidation of all forces determines the level of industry profitability. The adapted Five Forces Framework includes governmental interventions and the support by complementary goods as two additional forces. An operationalization method presented in this paper can be used by framework users to assess an industry's profitability. By operationalizing all framework forces, this paper leads to an indication about the profitability level of the German railway industry. The application of the adapted framework revealed a low profitability level. Porter's Five Forces Framework has been applied to several industries and even to railway related topics, but not yet to German railway manufacturing industry. To our knowledge, neither a validation nor implementation of different framework expansions combined with an application to the German railway industry has yet been published in any research report.