indonesian sme strategy measurement

Asian Journal of Business Management 3(2): 98-107, 2011ISSN: 2041-8752© Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011Received: March 02, 2011 Accepted: April 07, 2011 Published: May 15, 2011

Corresponding Author: Henry Pribadi, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, 1-7, Machikaneyama Toyonaka, Osaka560-0043, Japan

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Examining and Exploring Indonesia Small and Medium Enterprise Performance: An Empirical Study

Henry Pribadi and Kazuyori KanaiGraduate School of Economics, Osaka University, 1-7, Machikaneyama

Toyonaka, Osaka 560-0043, Japan

Abstract: This study attempts to explore and examining about Indonesia Small and Medium Enterprise (SME)performance through relationship with strategic management theory. We apply strategic management modelinto our research to explain the relationship of firm performance with firm determinants. Firm strategy, externalenvironment factors and internal resource factors of firm will be used as determinant of firm performance.Samples from Indonesia SME are collected and statistical analysis is applied to produce valid results. Resultshows direct positive relationship of firm strategy and internal factors of firm with firm performance. Directpositive relationship of external and internal factors of firm with firm strategy also recorded. Our finding showsthat high perform firms of Indonesia SME tend to use differentiation strategy, emphasize on organization assetsand human resource capabilities, and focus more on customer needs.

Key words: Indonesia small and medium enterprise, firm performance, firm strategy, firm factors

INTRODUCTION

Subject of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) willalways be an important factor in building economy ofdeveloping country, such as Indonesia. IndonesianMinistry of Small and Medium Enterprise announced thatup until 2009, there were almost 53 million unit of SMEin Indonesia and those units provide jobs to almost 100million citizen of Indonesia (MCSMERI, 2010).Brata (2003) noted that Indonesian SME comprised foralmost 90% of all business unit that was founded inIndonesia. Therefore it is very logical that Kuncoro(2000) argued that Indonesian SME significantlypromotes new jobs, new business, and contributes heavilyin reducing poverty. Those figures reflect how Indonesiareally depends on SME growth and SME will become akey factor to develop Indonesian economy.

On the other hand, researchers show that even thoughfor developing countries SME is a vital key to promoteeconomic growth; evidences show that to ensure thesustainability of a SME business is not an easy feat.Southiseng and Walsh (2010) clearly pointed out thatentrepreneurs in Laos faced numerous hurdles in theirstruggle to keep the business intact. Technological barrier,lack of good human resources, lack of focus, and harshtreatment from unfair policy of government clearly slowthe development of SME business in Laos. Eyaa andNtayi (2010) also pointed out similar situation in Uganda,where SME unit survivability is really low in the first yearof their founding and they focused more about problems

in supply chain and performances. Those finding clearlyshows that good SME business performance is a vitalnecessity in order to survive and more attention needed inunderstanding how to increase SME firm performance ineconomic market.

Therefore, looking back into Indonesia situation wecome across similar question: What about Indonesia SMEsituation? How are the performances of Indonesia SME?Unfortunately, few of research in topic of Indonesiabusiness, moreover of Indonesia small business arecurrently available in international journal. While thereare few Indonesian researchers try to focus on SME, butonly handful of them that discuss about SME performanceand impact on the firm. Agustina (2008) andHadiati (2008) discuss about Indonesia SME and capableof mentioning some factors that affecting SMEperformances, but the scale is relatively small and theyfocus more about the operational management rather thanfirm characteristics and real connection with firmperformance. Thus, we propose to conduct a research inorder to give more insight on Indonesia SME situation interm of firm performance.

In business research scope, it has been establishedthat essential way to examine performance of a firm is byapplying strategic management theory into the research.Numerous of researchers has established firmly about theimportance of firm strategy to gain competitiveadvantages and establishing good performance(Porter, 1985; Barney, 1991; Mintzberg andLampel, 1999). By examining the relationship between

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firm strategy and firm performance, researchers able tolook further into various factors that build the decisionstrategic of the firm and thus finding more about variationamong firm factors, such as technology, human resources,assets, capital, knowledge creation, and environmentcan influence a firm decision in establishing a strategyand furthermore influence how a firm perform(William et al., 1995; Pelham, 1999; Tsai and Li, 2007;Chen and Hsu, 2010; Ortega, 2010). Furthermore, agrowing body of firm strategy research in SME ofdeveloping countries also report similar argument andtheir result also show encouragement of applying strategicmanagement theorem in explaining variation anddeterminants of firm performance. Those researchesprovide significant evidences that similar treatment canalso be applied in smaller firms and certain advantagesdue to firm competitive strategic, internal firm factors, oreven opportunities from environmental external factorscan also materialized in small firms and in developingcountries region (Appiah-Adu, 1999; Li et al., 2005;Amoako-Gyampah and Acquaah, 2008; Arragon-Correa et al., 2008; Mashayekhi and Bazaz, 2008; Singh,2009). Based on these facts, we find out that strategicmanagement theorem and framework is a good platformto base our research and no conflicting problem reallyevident in choosing sample of SME in developing countrysuch as Indonesia.

This research will try to explore about IndonesiaSME business performance by examining the relationshipof firm strategy, firm factors, and firm performance inIndonesia SME. In order to accomplish our research, wepropose to discuss SME performance in paradigm of firmstrategy because we believe that strategy of a firm willgive direct and significant impact to firm performance. Byunderstanding a firm strategy and competitive advantagesthat build strategy, we can explain performance of a firmeasily. We based our research on framework that wasdeveloped by Spanos and Lioukas (2001) with somemodification to cope with our situation. We chooseSpanos and Lioukas (2001) as our base model for severalreasons; firstly, because their framework is unique byintegrating more factors (internal and external factors ofa firm) and connecting them with firm strategy andperformance. Rather than conflicting ideas of industryspecific to firm specific factors like some of theresearchers in strategic areas did (Hoopes et al., 2003),they incorporate the internal factor of firms (withrelationship to Resource-based View perspective(Barney, 1991) into structure-conduct-performance (SCP)of Porter (1979) hypothesis. This means more competitiveadvantages factor of a firm can be explained and impactto firm performance also might become more significant.Secondly because the main population of their research isSME in Greece; and our research also focus in SMEscope too, so the framework should be logically

compatible with our research. Another reason is to test therobustness of the framework by conducting similarresearch in other demographic area.

Then, to explore deeper to the firm factors that givecompetitive advantage to firm performance, we willseparate our sample into two groups according to theirperformance and compare each competitive advantagevariables to find more interesting facts about IndonesianSME. Based on the model, we will establishquestionnaires and gather data from Indonesia SME. Weapply statistic tools to check the data validity andreliability and use Structural Equation Model (SEM) tofind out the relationship of firm factors, strategy and firmperformance. Furthermore, we also categorized oursample into low and high perform firms in order to givedeeper and more detail view of our research. Result of thedata analysis will be reported and discussion and datainterpretation will be conducted to give our reader theresult of our investigation. We expect our result can helpus in exploring and understanding more about thesituation of Indonesia SME and from the result, somerough recommendation can be constructed.

LITERATURE REVIEW

One very basic thing that always gives foundation ofPorter (1979) thinking is about competition. Porter arguethat basic of understanding about the main reason of firmaction that in turn shape into strategy can be traced fromthe condition of firm competition. Here he proposed thatcompetition of firm will not only consists of merely interm of rival or firm that do business in similar industries.Porter proposed that there will be situation of externalpressure and threat that ultimately affect the way of firmdoing business. He called the pressure or forces asIndustrial Forces. Porter argued that there will be fivekinds of Industrial forces that ultimately affect firm indeciding their action in business. In his famous writingabout How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy(Porter, 1979) he developed a distinctive framework forexplaining how exogenous factors impact firms in a givenindustries. Porter describes five structural forces thatdetermine the performance potential of firms competingin a given industry. Essentially, five forces of industrystructure effects overall industry performance, andtherefore effects performance of firms within the industry.He proposed five forces of industrial forces as barrier ofentry, power of suppliers, power of buyers, substitutionthreat of product/service, and competitive rivals in thesame industry.

Furthermore, Porter tried to give interesting argumentabout the next step of external pressure that affects firmsin coping with their business. In accordance to his view,Porter argued that firms should position their strategy incertain position in order to achieve sustainable profit. He


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described his strategic position as Generic StrategyPosition (Porter, 1985). The main idea of this frameworkwill be in accordance to positioning of firm. Porterbelieved that when a firm wants to sustain its advantagein term of performance, certain actions must be conductedin order to assure the sustainability. Because Porterbelieved that external pressure and environment effectprimarily shaped firm action in business, or in other word,strategy. Porter logically believed that firm must targetitself to a certain position in its market in order to survive.By positioning itself in a market, he believed firm will beable to sustain its performance for a period of time. Healso believed that when a firm tries to reach more thanone position in a market, in long run that firm willdefinitely fall into tuck in the middle situation, which hedescribed it as a situation where a firm desperately try toreach various position without successfully define itself ina distinct position to defend. This kind of situation willultimately harm firm performance and make it lose itsadvantage in industry. To achieve that position, certainactions must be taken deliberately by firm, which we callas trategy. Initially there are three types of strategicposition that were mentioned by Porter, which were CostLeadership, Differentiate, and Focus. The significance ofany strength or weakness of firm posses is ultimately afunction of its impact on relative cost or differentiation.So, even though it seems there are three types ofpositioning strategies, in reality there are only twoessential positioning of cost leadership and differentiation.

In a completely different kind of focus than Porterdefinition of strategy, there was a different perspective ofstrategy, which is called as Resource-Based View (RBV)which takes root in Schumpeter thinking and definedmore in Barney (1991) research. The basic concept ofRBV perspective describes that firm is considered as abundle of resources, and some of its resources are uniqueto the firms. This unique resources in turn will define anddistinct firm performance in sustainable way (Bowmanand Ambrosini, 2007). The follower of RBV conceptargued that firm is heterogeneous in terms of their controlof important strategic resources, and that resources are notperfectly mobile between firms (Baraldi et al., 2007). Theimmobile resources that uniquely resided in the firm willdetermine the sustainability of firm performance. Theybelieve that some characteristic are resided in thoseunique resources that can distinguish them from commonresources, which are tacit, rare, hard to imitate, and non-transferable.

Spanos and Lioukas (2001) in their research of nExamination into the causal logic of rent generation:Contrasting Porter Competitive Strategy framework andthe Resource-based Perspective in Strategic ManagementJournal, vol. 22, pp: 907-934 had tried to explain howPorter framework and RBV perspective play their role inbusiness performance. They describe their model as a

comprehensive model that tries to see firm performancein broader way, rather focusing in one kind of strategyperspective. They tried to explain the complementaritiesbetween two perspectives and argue that both of views areneeded to explain business performance factors in moreintegrative way. In their framework, they consideredmarket pressure from outside of the firm as externalfactors and perspective of firm resources as internalfactors.

Their hypotheses mainly consist of how Porterframeworks and RBV perspective are complementingeach other in explaining firm performance. They arguedthat in general we can view both of strategy perspectivein different route, where competitive advantage of Porterframeworks provide Strength and Weakness of a firmwhile RBV perspective provides Opportunities and Threatin term of SWOT framework. In this light, they justifiedtheir composite framework on basis of three reasons: (a)two perspective are complementary in explaining a firmperformance by giving a more balanced view on thesources of competitive advantages (internal and externalfactors); (b) both perspective try to explain about how afirm can sustain competitive advantage through somefactors; (c) the unit of analysis is identical, which is, thefirm itself. Result of their researches show that theirmodel is quite valid and can explained, to a degree, aboutthe relationship of firm strategy, internal and externalfactors of firm, and firm performance

Figure 1 gives a good view of the framework of ourmodel. As in Spanos and Lioukas (2001) model, ourframework gives the relationship of firm factors (internaland external), firm strategy, and firm performance.External factors of the firm reflect the external pressureand exogenous market strength that affect firms, andinternal factors of the firm reflect the inner strength offirm, firm own resources that capable to give the firmcompetitive advantage in coping with competition andleveraging its own performance. Here we can see thatperformance of a firm is directly affected by how a firmconducts its strategy and also affected by various factorsfrom inside of firm and from external environment. Onthe other hand, internal and external factors of a firm willaffect how a firm react and formulate a strategy. Someminor modification is conducted on how a firm view theexternal environment (or in our model, external factors)on the relationship with firm strategy. Rather than goinginto offensive type as Spanos and Lioukas (2001) did, weprefer to build our model in the defensive type. Our mainreason is because of the type of population that clearlydiffers from previous reference. While Greece is a countrythat considered as a developed country, Indonesia is adeveloping country. Thus it is quite impossible for a smallfirm in a developing country to try to affect its externalenvironment. Lack of resources, capital, technology, andmarket share clearly show that in developing countries,


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ExternalFactor

InternalFactors

Firm Strategy Firm Performance

Fig. 1: Framework model (Spanos and Lioukas, 2001)

external factors of market environment will affect how asmall firm formulate its strategy. The firm will go intodefensive situation by trying to cope with any change andpressure that come from external environment and hopeto survive.

After we defined our framework to answer ourresearch question, the next step will be to build theappropriate questions to answer the question in the formof questionnaire. The previous research had been sogenerous by giving a detailed and well-established modelof research questionnaire. We will based heavily ourquestionnaire model into Spanos and Lioukas (2001)model, but some modification also needed to make surethe question compatible with our situation. Externalfactors variables and firm performance variables stilldeem to be compatible with our research, but internalfactors variables will be referred to Hall (1992) andGalbreath (2005) works which give more complete anddetail factors; and firm strategy will be based on Acquaahand Yasai-Ardekani (2008) works which give moreappropriate form to developing country firms. Thecomplete determinants can be viewed in Table 1.

METHODOLOGY

Based on previous framework research model, aquestionnaire of cross section is constructed. The basicquestion will consist of what the framework modelneeded: internal factors, external factors, firm strategy,and firm performance. Two control variable of firm ageand firm size also included. All questions, excluding ageand firm size, will be in Likert scale of 1 until 7 with 1 asstrongly disagree and 7 as strongly agree. References ofeach variables and what the questionnaire will consist ofcan be seen in Table 1.

Research sample collected from Indonesia SME inEast Java Region. According to SME Ministry ofIndonesian Republic, Small business is defined as anindependent firm with annual asset below 500 million

Table 1: Research variablesDeterminants ReferenceAge, Size Control variablesInternal factors Hall (1992) and Galbreath (2005)External factors Spanos and Lioukas (2001)Firm strategy Acquaah and Yasai-Ardekani (2008)Firm performance Spanos and Lioukas (2001)

rupiah (www.depkop.go.id). As one of business central inIndonesia, East Java Region is a good place to portrait thecondition of Indonesia SME for the composition ofbusiness firm approximately equal to national average(90% of East Java firm are SME type according to KanwilDeperindag, 2001). The list of SME firms acquired fromSME Ministry of Indonesia, East Java Branch. Wesucceed in collecting about 258 respondents reply aftersorting unsatisfying reply because of missing value, not inthe scope of SME business, or invalid answers. From ourcalculation, all respondent and questionnaire hadsuccessfully clear the 0.6 cut of factor loading (first andsecond degree), and from Table 2 we can examine that allComposite Reliability (CR) are higher than 0.81 andAverage of Variance Extracted (AVE) higher than cut offpoint 0.5. All of this shows validity in item reliability,composite reliability and discriminant validity (Fornelland Larcker, 1981; Hair et al., 2006).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) also conductedto ensure that manifest variables really reflected thehypothesized latent variables. Result of CFA showedP2/df = 2.141 (p<0.001) with goodness of fit indicatedGFI = 0.943, NFI = 0.898, CFI = 0.940, IFI = 0.943,RMSEA = 0.067. These indicators show that confirmatoryfactor model fit the data fairly well (Hair et al., 2006;Simsek et al., 2009)

RESULTS

Analysis will be focused on exploring therelationship on each factor in this model. As the mainresearch question asked in the first portion of this study,


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Table 2: Correlation coefficient, CR, and AVE Mean S.D 1 2 3 4 CR AVEExternal factors 5.08 0.83 1 0.81 0.57Internal factors 5.37 0.69 -0.14 1 0.96 0.53Firm strategy 4.78 0.63 0.44 0.07 1 0.91 0.52Firm performance 5.19 0.64 0.05 0.17 0.35 1 0.93 0.69

Table 3: Estimation of structural modelExamined path Standardized path coefficients p-value Result1. External factors ÷ Firm strategy 0.639 0.09 Supported at 10% level2. External factors ÷ Firm performance -0.068 0.459 Not supported3. Firm strategy ÷ Firm performance 0.192 0.03 Supported at 5% level4. Internal factors ÷ Firm performance 0.105 0.093 Supported at 10% level5. Internal factors÷ Firm strategy 0.219 0.05 Supported at 5% level

exploring the relationship of firm competitive advantagefactors (external and internal), firm strategy and firmperformance will be the key to understand how a firmworks. To answer these questions, this study proposes ofusing Structural Equation Model (SEM) method. Theadvantages of SEM method are because, unlike simpleregression method, SEM can simultaneously constructand examine more than one unobserved factors ratherthan one of a time. And the major advantageous are on thestrength of testing the reliability and validity ofhypothetical constructs of latent variables and explainingthe direct and indirect relationship among the latentvariables by regressing and describing observed andunobserved variance in the model (Anderson andGerbing, 1988).

The proposed structural model was estimated.Statistic result showed: P2/df = 1.62 (p<0.001) withgoodness of fit indicated GFI = 0.958, NFI = 0.929, CFI= 0.970, IFI = 0.972, RMSEA = 0.049. These parametersshow that the proposed structural model is deemed as fitand it can provide good basis for testing the hypothesizedpaths. Comparing with result of CFA, we can clearly seethat the proposed model give higher results, which aresign of better model fit; thus we can safely assume thatour model is indeed capable of explaining the situation.

The estimation of our framework model can beviewed from Table 3. The result shows that from all directrelationship, one relationship of external factors to firmperformance is not supported; while the othersrelationship are supported. Direct relationship of firmstrategy with firm performance and internal factors of thefirm with firm strategy show good evidence ($3 = 0.192,p<0.05; $5 = 0.219, p<0.05), while direct relationship ofexternal factors of the firm with firm strategy and internalfactors of the firm with firm performance give marginalsupport statistically ($1 = 0.639, p<0.1; $4 = 0.105, p<0.1).

Result from Table 3 gives us a general situation andrelationship of Indonesian SME in term of firmperformance. However, it is necessary to explore moreinto each factor to understand more about the buildingbrick of those firms. That is, exploring deeper into thedifference between firms in term of performance. Whileit is true that the previous result proved about higher

factors of firm and firm strategy will indeed leverage theperformance of firm, but it is still not so clear about whatkind of configuration the firms that perform better havecomparing with the marginal ones. By understanding thereal factors that separate better performed firms with themarginal ones, more explanation about firm factorconfiguration can be proposed. We referred to Kaynakand Kuan (1993) works in separating high and lowperform firm in order to understand better about therelationship of strategy, performance, internal andexternal factors.

To start with, the very first step in separating high-performance firms with the lower ones will be to conducta test of differences in performance. It is useless tocontinue exploring about firm performance differenceswhen the result shows that statistically there are nodifferences between high performed firms with the lowerperformed firm. In order to fulfill the basic requirement,sample of this study are being separated into two majorparts, high perform firms and lower perform firms. Theseparation is done by deciding cut off margin for the firmswho perform better than others. According to the natureof the questionnaires, cut off margin is given in middlevalue point of firm performance range from accumulationpoint of each questionnaire in firm performance questions.By describing the cut off margin, this study can decidethat any firms that giving score above the middle value orunder it. Because we have six question that ranging inLikert scale from 1 (very poor performance) to 7(outstanding performance) in each question, the middlepoint will be 21 of 42; where any firm that score 22 abovewill be categorized as high-perform firm and 21 lower aslow-perform firm. From 258 samples of firms, this studyfinds that 74 firms can be considered as high performerwhile 184 other firms can be considered as low performer.t-test is conducted to test the difference of firmperformances and the result shows that the differencesare, indeed, significant (tperformance = 20.0087, significant in5% level). This result gives good base to build nexthypotheses, which is about the significance differences ofhigh performer and low performer between firms. Byconducting t-test statistic to test the differences betweenfirms, result was gained and showed in Table 4.


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Table 4: Mean comparison of high and low performed firmMean of high Mean of low

Variables performed firm performed firmSize 9.924***a 5.838Age 13.457*** 17.405External factorsBarrier of entry 4.451 4.23Power of the supplier 5.523** 5.919Power of the buyer 5.538*** 5.014Substitution item 4.321** 4.946Competitive firms 5.505** 5.905Internal factorsTangible Asset 16.37* 17.04Intelligence property 13.755 14.432Organizational asset 16.054* 15.255Reputational asset 18.729 18.548Capabilities/Skill 36.678** 34.619Firm strategyCost Leadership 25.941*** 30.689Differentiation 21.858*** 18.109a ***: significant at 1%; **: significant at 5%; *: significant at 10%

Result from Table 4 clearly shows that almost all variablefactors of firm performance differ in term of high and lowperform firm, except in barrier of entry, intelligenceproperty asset and reputational asset of the firm. Resultalso shows that in Indonesia SME high perform firms,averagely, have bigger size, lower age, lower externalfactors pressure (except in power of the buyers), higherinternal factors (except in tangible asset), and preferringto differentiation strategy rather than cost leadership.

DISCUSSION

Our previous chapter gives us the detail result ofstatistical calculation about Indonesia SME firmperformance and its relationship with firm strategy,internal factors and external factors of the firm. Next, wewill try to make deeper and detail interpretation bycombining all of our result into one and give a properthought in addressing the main question of our research,which is, finding and exploring about the situation ofIndonesian SME.

We will start with external factors, which are definedas exogenous factors that impact firms in a certainindustry. Result shows that in relationship withperformance of Indonesia SME firms, our researchpropose that no significance direct relationship is foundbut indirect relationship is found through relationship withfirm strategy. This means in our sample, externalpressures from market give no significant direct effect tohow a firm performs in any condition. This finding showsthat Indonesia SME cannot tap the opportunity of externalcondition and market condition to turn it into theircompetitive strength directly. While some example fromdeveloped countries show how firms can benefit directlyfrom exogenous factors that reside in their respectivemarket (Bobillo et al., 2010), but our finding provesotherwise. We argue that this kind of situation might

happen in a developing country because not like indeveloped countries where market, government, andindustry environment give supporting advantages such ashigher educational labor, technology-based policy, goodinfrastructure, etc, situation in developing countries showlack of encouragement to establish a business(Flemming et al., 2009). Size of market share and volumeof the firms certainly show that SME in Indonesia lack ofpower in the market and in turn give no significantcontribution to its performance. With the sheer volume ofSME business in Indonesia, this finding cannot be said asencouraging news to us. Firstly, no significance ofexternal pressures and factors mean policies of ourgovernment regarding of the development of SME are noteffective. Secondly, Indonesian market and industry iscontrolled wholly by bigger firms and in the long run,these kinds of situation will detriment the developmentand growth of smaller firms. Thirdly, this sign of thebenign of market external situation in Indonesia.Researchers pointed out that good and dynamic conditionof market environment is needed in order for firms togrowth and prosper.

On the other hand, external factors of the firm stillcontribute to variety of firm performance indirectlythrough the relationship with firm strategy. Our result findout that there are relationship through firm externalfactors and firm strategy (and because relationship of firmstrategy and firm performance is significant, we can saythat external factors relate indirectly to the firmperformance). This finding show when an Indonesia SMEfirm formulate its strategy to gain competitive advantagein the market and getting better performance, it alsoconsider into the pressure of its environment. Therelationship of how external factors of a firm could affecthow a firm reacts in the form of applying some kind ofstrategy had been discussed quite a lot and positive andsignificant relationship also reported (Forman andHunt, 2005; Li et al., 2005). Going further into thediscussion, we find out that firms with higherperformance face relatively lower pressure from externalenvironment, except on factor of power of the buyers.Lower pressure from supplier, rivalry and itemsubstitution in higher performing SME in Indonesia proveto give a certain encouragement to choose their ownstrategy. The choice of strategy become more variedbecause pressure to yield into supplier demand or gettinginto bitter pricing wars with the rival or new industry alsotake lesser consideration. Thus the higher performingfirms tend to position themselves into differentiationstrategy in our result. The exception of higher effect ofpower of the buyers might also become theencouragement of higher perform firms to bolster theirstrategy in order to cope with customer needs, and copingwith customer needs mean they will going intocustomizing their strategy which is one sure


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characteristics of differentiation strategy. In turn theiractions will reward the firm with higher profit and marketshare. Our finding also gives further encouragement abouthow firm strategy and firm level internal factors givemore contribution in explaining variation of firmperformance rather than direct relationship betweenexternal factors and firm performance (Galbreath, 2005;Goddard et al., 2009).

Result of relationship between internal factors of thefirm with firm performance report a positive significantdirect relationship. Our finding suggest that internalfactors of Indonesia SME, which is firm own resources,will affect directly to firm performance. Our result alsoshows significant indirect positive relationship betweeninternal factors of the firm with firm performance throughfirm strategy. These results show us that (a) in IndonesiaSME, formulation of how a firm reacts and operate in themarket, i.e., strategy of the firm, will also be affected bythe configuration of its own internal firm resources and(b) those internal firm resources also directly affect onhow a firm perform in that industry. This finding givefurther encouragement to the importance of Resource-based view perspective that firm internal resource are,indeed, a necessity for a firm to attain its competitiveadvantage and firm strategy simultaneously with internalfirm resources explain how a firm perform. Numerousbody of researches also report similar finding (Canto andGonzales, 1999; Edelman et al., 2005).

Going further into the result, we find out thatIndonesia SME give no significant emphasize in term ofintelligence property and reputation. This can betranslated as low-level technology based characteristicson the SME and lack of advertising skill. Low added-value products certainly become the major products forIndonesia SME and this finding explain why IndonesiaSME performance is very lacking. By consideringproducing and selling high added-value and goodadvertising management; higher gain and higher marketshare can be expected in the long run (Mc Cutchen andSwamidass, 1966; Gjerde and Slotnic, 2004). Higherperforming firms show characteristics of higheremphasize on organizational assets and skill of humanresource. Higher performance of a firm in Indonesiaclearly affected by higher skill of human resource in thefirm and good organization management; in turn, thosefactors also reflected on the choice of differentiationstrategy (Chan and Wong, 1999; Morchet et al., 2006).This finding further encourage others finding about howgood human resource and good management oforganizational will directly impact to performance of afirm (Collis, 1994; Wu and Wang, 2007). One moreinteresting finding in our research is about the tangiblefactor of firm internal factors. Our finding show thathigher performing firms consider tangible factor lessimportant than low performing ones, this kind of finding

give one more proof of how tangible asset can bedisregard in discussing about firm resources. AsGalbreath (2005) propose, we find no evidence in relatingtangible assets of a firm with higher performance. Thuswe recommend for Indonesia SME to focus more intodeveloping their intangible internal asset rather thanworrying into tangible asset, for in long term intangibleand capabilities of the firm will significantly affectinghigher profit and higher performance.

In term of firm strategy, we have already partiallydiscussed about the significance of firm strategy inexplaining firm performance. As our result suggests,formulating a strategy will give positive impactsignificantly to the performance of a firm and strategyformulation of a firm will be affected greatly by itsexternal environment situation and internal resourcefactors simultaneously. Our result show firm strategy isthe greatest factor that explains the variation of firmperformance in Indonesia SME. By formulating fit andgood strategy, impact on firm performance will be greatlyaffected (Mintzberg, 1987; Amoako-Gyampah andAcquaah, 2008). Furthermore our result shows higherperforming firm in our sample show distinct characteristicby favoring into differentiation strategy rather than costleadership strategy. This finding can be explained becausein small firms, going into cost leadership strategy is not anappropriate strategy. Cost leadership strategy leansheavily into economic of scale, which only can be used inbig and top market share firms. Small firms lack of meansto pursue this kind of action, and doing so in long termwill further detriment its own profit margin and goingfurther into price wars (in case of price wars again bigcompany, we can sure that small firms will have noprobability of victory). Thus, by going into differentiationstrategy, firm can differentiate their own uniquecharacteristics and create a market share that solely fitinto their own setting. In doing so, firm will generatehigher profit and capture the loyalty of customer thatsatisfied with the model (Porter, 1985). By looking intothe relationship of firm strategy and firm factors, we findout that in Indonesia SME, firms with concern to voice ofthe customers and emphasize more into organizationassets and human resources will tend to formulate theirstrategy differently. They will try to customize theiraction to cope with customer needs and simultaneouslylooking into their own internal strength. By understandingtheir own internal assets and coping into customer needs,the action of the firm will create a unique customizestrategy which affected greatly by external voice andinternal strength. This progress will in turn take the firmsinto applying unique and differentiation strategy into themarket. On the other hand, low performing firms inIndonesia tend to play into slashing prices strategy (or inother words, cost leadership strategy), emphasizing moreinto tangible assets and suffer more with pressure fromthe market. Without having any unique strategy and rely


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solely into low prices, these firms will suffer more thanhigher performing firms.

CONCLUSION

In this study, we discuss about exploration ofIndonesia SME firms performance in relationship withfirm strategy and firm factors (internal and external).Through our model we establish the questionnaire andcollect the data. By applying statistical tools, we analyzethe model and present some interesting finding. We findpositive direct relationship between firm strategy and firmperformance; internal resource of the firm and firmperformance. We find out direct positive relationshipbetween external and internal factors of the firm with firmstrategy. We argue that market condition of IndonesiaSME is benign, with big firms impact heavily into thedynamic of the market environment. We also posit thatIndonesia government need to rethink their policy instrengthening and regulating the small firms in Indonesiaif they want Indonesia SME to grow. Formulating a firmstrategy is a must if a firm wants to survive and attainsustainability in Indonesia. Firm needs to be aware of itsinternal strength and to cope with the environment inorder to formulate a fit and good strategy in its domainbusiness.

This study has tried to give better understanding onthe subject of firm performance through inspectingsimilarities of two theories and viewing them as asynergic research framework. This research frameworkbasically view firm performance as the result ofcombination of external forces of the firms as industrialeffect, the internal strength of the firm resources as firmeffect, and the action of the firms to cope with externalforces and utilizing its own resources as firm strategy.Through empirical study, this study clearly showed somegood evidence about the inter relationship between thosefactors. It is showed that external factors of the firms,together with its resources will positively affect firms inimplementing its strategy. On the other hand, firmstrategy and its resources clearly give positive impact inhelping firm to achieve good performance. This kind ofresult clearly gives good acceptance and support forresearchers that posit about the importance of combiningand synergizing those theorems.

By going further into our analysis, finding aboutinteresting characteristics on Indonesian SME can bereported. Indonesia SME firms that perform higher intheir market tend to operate with differentiation strategy,emphasize more into organization assets and their humanresource capability. Those firms also give more attentioninto customer needs. Combinations of those factorsreward firms with greater competitive advantage and inturn give leverage into their performance. We also notedthat Indonesia SME still rely heavily into low-value added

products, low innovation and no intellectual propertyemphasize. Lack of advertising and reputation alsoshadows the situation of Indonesia SME. We recommendnew venture that want to establish business in Indonesiashould consider in producing high level value addedproduct through higher technology level used inmanufacturing/service and seriously considering applyingand inventing new intelligence property. Lack ofreputation and advertising also cause lower market shareand in turn will cause external market environment to giveno positive effect into the firm.

Of course, there still a lot of aspect that can beexamined further and as a research, this study also has itsown restriction and limitation. This conclusion can onlybe certain in its own territory, which is the sample scope.To really be able to confirm whether this conclusion canbe applied to wider scope, more sample and deeperexamination into Indonesian business climate and culturewill be needed. Going into another direction such asbigger firms and separating into different kind of businessand industries also will give clearer insight about whathappened in the Indonesian business communities.Another point is, although this study can revealed someinteresting relationship on the building bricks of firmperformance in empirical level, still empirical limitationobstruct this study to examine further about the real detailof each relationship and how can those relationship can bestarted. To tackle these issues, deeper qualitativeresearches that include detail case studies report arerecommended.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to express our sincere gratitude toMonbukagakusho Scholarship of Japanese Governmentwhich provides major support and funding for ourresearch, Indonesian Small and Medium EnterprisesMinistry which assist us in providing vital data andinformation, and professors and colleagues of GraduateSchool of Economics, Osaka University in Japan thatsupport and comment on our research and journal draft.We extend our thanks to Professor Tatsuo Kimbara andProfessor Yoshi Takahashi of IDEC Hiroshima Universityfor sharpening our ideas. Lastly, we like to extend ourgratitude to our reviewer and editor who comments andassist us in constructing this study.

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