Paper Title
Focus Vs Diversification: A Study Of Select Firms In India
Abstract
We studied the performance of 60 firms, 30 each from two groups of firms namely, focused and diversified. Further, of the 30 firms in each group, 10 each were selected on the basis of three different sizes; small (with assets INR 50 billion). Our intent was to determine which of these displayed superior economic performance. We analyzed data for two points of time 2006-07 and 2013-14 using three measures of economic performance. These include profit after tax (PAT), return on capital employed (ROCE) and asset turnover ratio (ATR). We employed parametric (MANOVA, ANOVA and Chi-square) as well as nonparametric (Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis) tests. Our study concluded that there is no significant difference in the performance between focused and diversified firms. However, we found significant difference in the performance of firms based on size, though there were no interaction effects between size and type. Particularly, when diversified and focused firms were separately studied, it was found that for focused firms alone there were significant differences in performance between firms of different sizes.
Keywords� Corporate Strategy, Diversification, Focused Businesses, India.