Factors Affecting Competitive Advantages of Civil Aircraft Manufacturers Exporting to Emerging Markets: an Example of Sukhoi Superjet 100 Aircraft in China and Mexico

Civil aircraft industry is one of the most representative market sectors of the economy of a country. What is more, aviation manufacturing industry is interconnected with many different spheres and market segments, which are involved in the process of civil aircraft development and further construction. Civil aircraft market sector may be considered as one of the most complicated due to challenging conditions in the market, global character of the industry, technological difficulties, complicated aims and goals for the manufacturers and airline companies, high costs for the production and operation, etc. Current research is relevant due to constantly changing trends on the world stage of civil air aircraft manufacturing, where competition is growing from day to day. Companies manufacturers of civil aircraft are adopting to the circumstances of todays’ world and optimize their strategies according to the factors, which are significant for the competition performance. The following work is based on the number of fundamental studies, such as “The concept of corporate strategy” and “Business Policy: Text and Cases” by Keneth Richmond Andrews, “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” and “From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy” by Michael Eugene Porter. Also, for the current master thesis the findings of term paper titled “Key factors influencing the choice of foreign suppliers for the implementation of international projects in the civil aviation industry in different countries by the example of the Russian – Chinese civil aircraft construction project” (Y. Pilipchuk, 2020) were used. The main goal of the research is to identify, if there are such factors, stated in the hypothesis, which are difficult or almost impossible to predict, which in the same time makes it complicated to minimize their influence on the competitive advantages of civil aircraft manufacturing companies. The following methods are used for the research: critical analysis of primary and secondary sources, comparative analysis of numerical data, quantitative and qualitative analysis of statistical data, and case-study conducted.