Car Brands in a Competitive Environment: How Are They Building Their Value Creation Processes?

A value creation process, usually presented in the form of a complex flowchart and placed at the beginning of a report, describes the material and financial inputs and outputs of the commercial process, as well as the corporate philosophy, core values, strengths, key issues, management policies or business strategies. This article is devoted to analyzing the content and structure of global car brands' value chains and value creation processes. The purpose of the research is to find out what is the vision of the own processes of value creation by car manufacturers, identify indicators that are used to assess capital inflows and outflows, and single out the features of value chains specific to the automobile industry. The information base of the research is the annual or integrated reports of five global car brands - Mazda, Nissan, Suzuki, Saab, and Isuzu. The authors used scientific methods of generalization, grouping, comparison, and induction to process the collected data. Based on the analysis of the value creation process schemes presented in the annual/integrated reports, the structure and composition of the value creation processes are outlined in tabular form for each car manufacturer. It was found that the approaches to revealing the structure of value-creation processes in the researched reporting are similar in most respects. The study results show that all value chains contain the primary stage, where resources are attracted for further production; the middle link, where production is actually carried out; and the final link, which is directed to the delivery of products to the final consumer. The article defines the structural elements of capital inputs, upward activity, operations, downward activity and capital outputs as stages of the value-creation process of car manufacturers.