COMPETITIVENESS OF THE ENTERPRISE: ECONOMIC ESSENCE AND EVOLUTION OF VIEWS

The article analyzes modern conceptual approaches to substantiate the economic essence of the enterprise competitiveness and considers the corresponding methods of competitive analysis. It is shown that, despite the fact that competitiveness is one of the key economic terms and despite the existence of a large number of scientific studies on competitiveness, today there is no generally accepted definition of this term. It is argued that the most common approach to the interpretation of competitiveness at the enterprise level is the analysis of existing competitive advantages, but there are discrepancies in the methods of their accounting and ranking. The expediency of applying competitive analysis, which consists in assessing the level of competition in a certain market for the purpose of substantiating business decisions, is substantiated. Today, the term "competitiveness" is used in different perspectives, as scientists put different concepts into its essence. It is shown that in the economic literature one can find three approaches to understanding the term "enterprise competitiveness". The first approach is based on an analysis of the internal and external activities of the enterprise without mentioning products or goods. The second approach is based only on the study of the product, that is, the competitiveness of a company is considered as its ability to produce a competitive product or service. The third approach combines the commodity and production activities of the company. It is shown that the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises is often determined by the methods provided for large companies, which is not justified, since SMEs differ in their organizational structure, forms of cooperation with the environment, management systems and ways of competing with other companies. Competitiveness can belong to different levels of aggregation: supranational, national, regional, local, industrial, sectoral, as well as individual companies. It was argued that given the fact that a single conceptual approach to the economic substantiation of the term "competitiveness" has not yet been developed, there is currently no single methodology for comprehensive quantitative assessment of the competitiveness of an enterprise, the need for which is becoming increasingly urgent.