Abstract:

Enterprises all over the world struggle to define and extend their very specific competitive advantage in order to gain market share and beat their competitors. A company’s value and therefore status is often measured via its assets. For traditional branches such as machinery these assets are mostly tangible. But as technological progress and products themselves can be adapted by many companies much quicker than in the past, terms like culture, network and intellectual capital find their way into business strategies.This research will analyze the correlation between Intellectual capital and the sales growth rate as well as the operating margin within the automotive industry in order to describe the priority and focus for this aspect within business strategies. Within scientific literature Knowledge Management measurement of automotive enterprises has not been in focus so far (except papers focusing on single Eastern Europe car manufacturers). This study will provide insights regarding the status of Knowledge Management within the automotive branch via analysis of VAIC  (value added intellectual capital) values. Furthermore the correlations between various traditional key performance indicators have been analyzed in numerous scientific papers.