Industry convergence

This thesis is focused on how firms behave when converging environments with strategic alliances. In the recent years they have made some strategic choices that resulted in them becoming direct competitors or partners. Our goal is to explore and understand the moves in the context of convergence with 'Resource Based View'. The industry where they are facing each other is mobile wallet services During recent years there has been a rapid increase of new payment solutions. So-called mobile payment solutions are a category of payment solutions that utilize the rapid adoption of cell phones, especially smart phones. Since the mobile payment industry is rapidly expanding and mobile payment industries result from the convergence of the mobile communications and financial payment industries, it is an interesting industry to study for mobile wallet services. The industry is to a large extent knowledge-based and we believe that a successful mobile wallet solution is often not only built on good technology, but also dependent on collaborations with several different actors in the mobile payment value network. Since the collaborations are of major importance we decided to further investigate which collaborations made years between 2008-2014 with 138 mobile wallet service provider. Further, we hope to develop an understanding of what different kind of actors are in the mobile wallet industry. According to the result of analysis, it has been found out that alliances is chosen over merger and acquisitions. An important element of their related actions has been the use of strategic alliances. The alliances can be done before, during or after the convergence process. There are four main actors found in the industry contributed to the literaure in this study.