Helen Castellón-Orozco, Natalia Jaría-Chacón, Laura Guitart-Tarrés

The adoption of the servitization strategy in Spanish manufacturing companies: a spatial analysis by autonomous communities

The servitization represents a very attractive market strategy for the manufacturing industry. In fact, the
evolution of the capacity of manufacturers to offer services as complements or substitutes for the products
they manufacture offering optimal solutions to the demands has also demonstrated a rapid increase since
the 1980s. An extensive literature has described these strategies and has demonstrated that this
phenomenon is widespread and is increasing in most developed economies. However, there is no empirical
evidence of the scope or results of servitization on all manufacturing companies.

Considering that servitization is a growth strategy and increasingly used by companies, but, not analyzed
in detail from a spatial perspective. Thus, this work aims to focus on the spatial relationship. Particularly,
the main aim of this paper is to analyze if the servitization strategy presents a similar pattern of behavior
in the Spanish territory through the application of the spatial analysis technique. To achieve this goal, the
study is carried out by autonomous communities in order to identify the presence of significant
relationships between servitization and some economic variables such as the profitability of sales, the size
of the company and total revenues. Finally, derived from the results obtained by the present study, it is
shown that there is variability of behavior in terms of servitization in all autonomous communities that
make up the Spanish territory.

Keywords: Servitization; manufacturing firms; strategy; Spain.

Check other articles from the issue Issue 45 – Winter 2019 or from other issues.

To cite this article

Castellón-Orozco, H. ; Jaría-Chacón, N. ; Guitart-Tarrés, L. (2019). La adopción de la estrategia de servitización en las empresas manufactureras españolas: un análisis espacial por comunidades autónomas. Investigaciones Regionales - Journal of Regional Research, 45, 39-53.