• English (United Kingdom)
  • Russian (CIS)
Designing the System of Customer Relationships at Metallurgical Enterprises

Author: Svetlana V. Orekhova, Cand. Sc. (Econ.), Associate Prof. of Business Economics Dept.

Abstract: At the example of the cold-formed tube market the author investigates current economic situation at metallurgical enterprises. The findings show that the market capacity is declining because of unfavourable economic situation in the world, the market experiences the influence of significant seasonal risks and is highly dependent on the development of related industries. Besides, recently Russian producers have suffered from serious pressure from Chinese companies. At the same time due to the changes in socio-economic situation and increased barriers to entry for overseas companies Russian producers have a unique opportunity to retain and in some cases to strengthen their market positions.

The effective system of customer relationships is regarded by the author as a tool that may help maintaining sustainable competitive advantages of an enterprise. To provide comprehensive analysis of particularities of customer behaviour the author uses the method of multi-stage market segmentation.

The described approach was tested at the example of OAO “Sinarskiy trubniy zavod” (in the part of cold-formed tube production). The suggested technique allows not only retaining market share of a company, but also can yield extra profit.

Keywords: sustainable competitive advantage; metallurgical enterprise; relational capital; a multi-stage market segmentation.