Competitiveness of enterprises: selected concepts and determinants

The purpose of this work, in the theoretical part, is to analyse competitiveness concepts used in the literature and the main determinants exerting a significant impact on competitiveness of modern enterprises, with special consideration of the construction business. It is important to investigate and understand how particular factors determine competitiveness of enterprises, and pay particular attention to such aspects connected with analysis of enterprise competitiveness as competitive position, sources and instruments of building competitive advantage and the significance of broadly understood economic environment of enterprises in competitiveness growth. The paper contains a discussion of the significance of particular financial indicators in an analysis of business competitiveness. Moreover, the concept of the so-called Nagashima's Radar is presented, as well as its usefulness to provide a synthetic overview of the changes in the sets of selected indicators concerning the studied entities, as compared with the rival firms from the same branch. The empirical part presents an analysis of competitiveness of the biggest construction companies from Podlaskie Voivodship.