Company relationships in a technological district: The case of the Turin automotive industry

The paper is focused on the company relationships among the small and medium sized firms of the supply-chain of Fiat. We consider how the "second-tier" suppliers - i.e. the sub-contractors mainly composed of small firms that usually do not have commercial relations with Fiat - deal with the first-tier suppliers, i.e. MNEs that have direct relationship with Fiat. The descriptive statistics of the study is based on a sample of 79 firms, within 7 different supply chains of first-tier companies of the Turin area. After a description of the automotive district of Turin, the second section of the paper considers the main characteristics of our sample of 79 suppliers, from the quantitative and qualitative point of view. Within the third section we study the company relationships according to some quantitative indicators, such as the value, the weight and the dynamics (1998-1993) of the commercial relations. The fourth section is about the qualitative characteristics of the company relationships: production organization, labour organization, just-in-time, contractual systems, innovation process, co-design, simultaneous engineering, etc. A final section summarises the main findings of the study.