Cooperation and competition in an oligopolistic and mature industry: A case study on the cationic reagent industry based on an optimization model

A cationic reagent is an essential raw material in printing paper production. The market environment of the cationic reagent industry is influenced by the printing paper industry. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global expansion of remote work and home education has decreased the demand for printing papers. Consequently, competition among market players (i.e., suppliers and buyers) in the cationic reagent industry is intensifying. This study focuses on cooperation between market players in the cationic reagent industry, representing a typical oligopolistic and mature industry. It proposes a supply chain optimization model that minimizes the costs of the entire supply chain, incorporating buyers’ risk hedge tendency to address market uncertainty. The model is empirically tested using accessible and reliable data to assess its business applicability. Numerical experiments are conducted to explore scenarios that can occur in real market environment, such as levels of risk hedging, trade disputes, decreases in demand, and changes in production capacity. The experimental results provide managerial implications. As buyers maximize the degree to which they diversify their purchase quantities across multiple suppliers to reduce risks, differential costs of the entire supply chain increase by 19%, which are costs that cannot be reduced by suppliers’ capabilities and inevitably arise due to differences between suppliers (e.g., geography, politics, and government policies). However, in unfavorable market conditions, such as trade disputes and decreases in demand, less competitive suppliers can survive. This study shows that when market demand in the cationic reagent industry decreases, two suppliers may potentially experience operational outages. In reality, these two suppliers deteriorated under the challenging market conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.