Determinants of enterprise performance have long been of core interest to strategic management researchers. Therefore, this study was carried out to identify and analyze the performance of strategic groups in the Brazilian clothing industry describing their characteristics to compare with defined variables in the study. Data of 510 enterprises from 2006 were used. The efficiency scores were calculated using Data Envelopment Analysis, cluster analysis was used to identify groups, and Discriminant Analysis was used to validate the clusters. The results showed high degree of inefficiency, and the average deficiency of efficiency results showed the possibility to increasing of 98.17% in outputs keeping the same level of inputs. It was possible to identify three strategic groups significantly validated by the discriminant analysis, and the group composed basically of large enterprises showed better performance than the one composed basically by micro and small enterprises. The presence of different strategic groups, especially with regards to size, shows that the domestic industry has internal barriers inherent in the peculiarities of the higher resource availability of large companies than that of small companies. Therefore, these results agree with those reported in the literature concerning the suggestion that micro and small businesses should focus on other strategies to avoid competition with the economies of scale of large enterprises. In terms of strategic groups, this allows the building of internal barriers of mobility strengthening the competitiveness of the national industry.
Clothing sector; Efficiency analysis; Strategic groups; Performance
