Abstract: Strategic positioning has been extensively discussed in the strategic management field, but the constitution of a good position and the mechanisms are not fully revealed. Some studies that claimed to provide strategic positioning knowledge actually focused on certain product or marketing issues. The firm-level strategic positioning still lacks a solid theoretical basis and enough empirical evidence.
Based on the strategic group theory, this study proposes that the key point of competitive strategic positioning is to achieve a good fit between strategic dimensions of competitive strategies. China's internet industry is chosen as the empirical background, and a two-dimensional positioning model consisting of mobile internet business and information technology investment is investigated. Specifically, the proportion of mobile internet business and the intensity of IT investment are tested in separate and combined ways to find the positions where firms are more likely to achieve high performance.
The sample contains Chinese internet companies listed on Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, New York and NASDAQ Stock Exchanges over the period of 2011 to 2014. Data are collected from annual reports, homepages of the sample firms and the CSMAR Database. The fixed-effects model and the random-effects model regressions of panel data are used to test research hypotheses, and group comparisons are made to illustrate our results. Firm performance is measured by operating revenue and the size of internet end users.
Our first result is that a firm is more likely to get better performance than the industry average if the firm's mobile internet business proportion and IT investment intensity are both high. Another result is that firms with both low mobile internet business proportion and low IT investment intensity also perform better than those having a high mobile internet business proportion or high IT investment intensity alone. These results demonstrate that the interaction between mobile internet business and IT investment, instead of each strategic variable's independent effect, determines the relative advantage of positions. It's difficult to identify good strategic positions by considering each strategic dimension separately. The key point of successful competitive strategic positioning is to find a good fit between the strategic dimensions, and thereby form an advantageous strategy pattern. The findings also suggest that firms should take the competition within the industry into account to choose among reasonable positions.
Theoretical and empirical supports are given to develop mobile internet business and enhance information technology investment, and provide insights into firms' competitive strategic positioning. The conclusions also indicate that the strategic group level of analysis should not be substituted by the separate analyses of each strategic variable.

Key words: strategic positioning, strategic groups, strategic dimensions, mobile internet, information technology investment