From Imitation to Surpassing

Being a legendary character, Phil Knight established Nike Company in 1972, which was rapidly forged into a leading brand among sporting products industry all over the world. What is more significant is that in 1980s, Knight practiced the pattern of "asset-light strategy" and nowadays it has proved to be a dominating business pattern in worldwide sporting products industry. Even those traditional sports brands with a hundred years history have to choose the "Nike style" surviving way in order to catch up with the expansion rhythm of Nike Company. As for this Phil Knight said "the only way to beat Nike is to imitate us fully and accurately, and then try to find out differences to break up".
China's outstanding gymnast, Lining set up a sporting products corporation with his own name, and China's sporting products industry turned into "branding" stage of development. However in the first ten years, most Chinese sporting goods manufacturers are just important OEM partners of Nike's "asset-light strategy" pattern, therefore, a batch of OEM type factories with good manufacturing skills were created. There are nearly 3000 footwear products manufacturing businesses in Jin Jiang, which is a costal city of Fujian province, and there are over 300000 employees, with a yearly output of 650 million pair of shoes Among them, Chen Dai town, with an area of only 38.8 square kilometers, is the main sporting shoes manufacturing base in China and even in the world. At present, Jin Jiang's brands including Anta, 361°, Deer Way, Jordon, JINAK and so on have developed quickly to be the significant contestants in local Chinese sporting products market through the imitation of Nike}.Just like what Phil Knight said the competition of worldwide sporting products industry is more and more convergent to "Nike pattern". With Lining, Anta as representatives of China local sporting goods enterprises are also pursuing the mode of "asset-light strategy", which means it will be harder and harder to surpass Nike.
We could come to a conclusion from the competition of Nike with Reebok and Nike with Adidas: to copy Nike Corporate is surly an efficient tactic to chase it, however wishing to exceed Nike Company is not a matter of using invariably what Knight affirmed.
For example, Rebook surpassed Nike by springing up female sporting goods market, and Adidas is competing with Nike all over the world via merging strategy, and Nike beat back Rebook after finishing global operation, which all prove that those innovative companies that adopted effective strategies according to target market, could win the initiative status in competition.
One of Nike Company's soft ribs was revealed in 1998 Asian financial crisis. Because "asset-light strategy" pattern doesn't involve in the process of specific products manufacturing, and this process was produced by Asian OEM factories, which could cause two big managing problems, and one is the supply chain management, another is production quality control. With the economic environment's external fluctuation, Nike Company's overall operating performances are affected by Asian OEM factories' cost, delivery, logistics and so on.