Kepemilikan aset spesifik, keunggulan kompetitif, dan struktur modal perusahaan: Studi kasus perusahaan publik di Indonesia

Abstract

Sustainable competitive advantagearises from unique asset ownership. Asset specificity creates company’s distinctive competencethat difficult to be imitated by competitor. This asset specificityis more difficult to imitate if information and description about this asset are not transparent for competitor, even for company that owns this asset because of the unique production process or ambiguous relationship with other internal factors such as corporate culture and quality of human resources. On the other hand, the ownerhip of this specific and opaque asset has serious consequences on financing strategy. Bank faces serious difficulty to make an accurate valuation of specific and opaque asset so that bank charges higher cost of debt. This will imply that company capital structure will be dominated by equity. This paper test this hypothesis in Indonesian context using non-financial firm data. This paper tests empirically hypothesis that is developed from resource based view strategy that very well known in strategic management literature stating that the asset specificity and opacity affectfinancial strategy of the firm. We found that Indonesian firms have unique condition that different from expectation of resource based view strategy. On average, Indonesian firms’ R&D expenses are very low and have very marginal effect to capital structure. Conservatism of Indonesia accounting principle on reportingR&D expenses has serious bias on measuring assetspecificity and opacity. Keywords:asset