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In a highly competitive business environment, firms are increasing their endeavor to strengthen their competitiveness in the market. Through their quest in this direction, they search for resources that complement their needs for further growth and prosperity. Since the beginning of the 1980s, a new strategy named "coopetition" is being explored and researched by scholars to address the relationship between competing firms. Coopetition stands for cooperation among competing firms where cooperation and competition exist simultaneously. Accordingly, this thesis attempts to better understand the concept of "coopetition strategy" and explore the relationship among the GCC aluminum smelters in the context of this strategy. It also aims to explore the areas/activities where cooperation and competition are happening and the extent of such cooperation and competition in each activity. Finally, it tries to discover the impact of coopetition on the competitiveness of the smelters. Finally, it attempts to discover if this relationship (i.e. coopetition) has an impact on competitiveness, construing as an explanatory four hypothesis to explore and argue the nature of the relation among GCC smelters. It is the aim of this work to show that "coopetition strategy" has the potential to increase the smelters competitiveness by cooperating and competing at the same time. Prominent database such as ProQuest, research articles, strategy books, questionnaire, and interviews have been utilized for valid and reliable conclusion. The statistical data analysis SPSS was used to analyze the questionnaire of the respondents. Conducting primary research among 46 managers where online questionnaire was distributed and respondents were asked to reflect their perceptions on the nature of "competition and cooperation" relationship and the extant of that relationship among the GCC smelters. Coopetition key dimensions (i.e. competition and cooperation) and their impact on competitiveness were examined through the questionnaire that reflected the participant perception, which indicated a strong competition on one side and average to weak cooperation on the other side. Similarly, it indicated that the simultaneous cooperation (coopetition) and competition will have a positive impact on the overall smelters' competitiveness. The study concluded that there has been average cooperation among the GCC aluminium smelter, while there was a strong competition. The average cooperation also revealed that there are areas with strong cooperation such as cooperation in safety, health and environment, while there was weak cooperation in areas like R&D. Similarly, there was strong competition in marketing and market share and average competition in training and development. This thesis has succeeded to achieve its objective to explore and understand the topic of coopetition, though it is new topic and there were no enough research on it especially as far as the GCC region is concerned. Similarly this study has managed (to a certain extent) to explore the degree of the simultaneous cooperation and competition (coopetition) among the GCC aluminum smelters and to argue the effect of this relationship on the overall competitiveness.
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