The Impact of Information Technology Investment on the Performance of Apparel Manufacturing Enterprises: Based on the Moderating Effect of Equity Concentration

Abstract

As a relatively large production and trade industry in China's manufacturing sector, apparel manufacturing has entered the data analytics era with much-enhanced productivity by using information technology. The extent to which the state-of-the-art information technologies can increase the productivity of this entire industry has not been fully investigated. This article selects 30 Chinese listed apparel manufacturing enterprises from 2012 to 2018 as a sample and analyzes the impact of information technology investment on their performance using the panel fixed effect and random effect models. In addition, the moderating effect of enterprise equity concentration on the abovementioned relationship is studied. Equity concentration reflects the distribution of equity from the total amount. Excessive equity concentration enables large shareholders to obtain higher control rights with smaller cash flows, seizing the interests of small and medium shareholders and digging tunnels. This is, thus, not conducive to healthy and long-term development of the firm. The results show that information technology, such as software investment, hardware investment, and total information technology investment, can improve the enterprise performance. Among them, software investment has the greatest impact on the enterprise performance. When the proportion of the software investment increases by 1%, the enterprise performance increases by 17.6%. The equity concentration has a negative impact on the relationship between the investment in information technology and enterprise performance.