Integração vertical, grupos estratégicos e competitividade: o caso do sistema agroindustrial da soja

Abstract

The profound changes in the institutional environment that the Brazilian economy has experienced in recent years, especially in the 1990s, influenced the coordination of the soy agro-industrial system (SAG). The State transferred responsibility for financing agriculture to the private sector, which, together with changes in tax legislation, demanded a response from the crushing and soybean-producing industries to this new institutional environment. In order to adapt to this new environment, the strategies adopted individually by the firms changed the transaction attributes, where new forms of contractual relations were created, requiring changes in the governance structures that would make the coordination of the productive system efficient. Vehicle integration through the acquisition of fertilizer companies was adopted as a strategy by two multinationals, as a way to guarantee the supply of soy necessary for their crushing and origination activities. This new institutional arrangement changed the competitive environment of the SAG for soybeans, where strategic groups were formed, assuming that the soybean processing firms that have a great control over the fertilizer production chain have competitive advantages over the firms that are in the others. strategic groups. To assess these impacts of institutional changes and to be able to relate competitiveness to governance structures in the soy SAG, the Transaction Cost Economy served as an analytical tool, aiming to identify the competitive advantages in the soy origination process by the crushing companies which are vertically integrated into the fertilizer chain.