{"id":6774,"date":"2026-07-26T20:21:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T18:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maraz.es\/?p=6774"},"modified":"2026-07-30T14:17:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:17:58","slug":"benchmarking-how-to-analyse-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maraz.es\/en\/benchmarking-how-to-analyse-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Benchmarking: How to analyse the competition to improve your strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benchmarking: How to Analyse the Competition to Improve Your Strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Almost every business owner I know can tell whether their company is doing well. Very few can tell whether it is doing well compared with the company next door.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You close the year, revenue is up 6%, the margin is holding and debt is under control: a good year. The problem is that this verdict has been built by comparing you with yourself \u2014 the most comfortable reference there is, because it almost always confirms what you already believed.<\/p>\n

Benchmarking breaks that mirror: it compares your results, your processes and your decisions, in an ordered way, with those of direct competitors, sector leaders and companies that do well something you do only adequately. It is not curiosity about the neighbour, nor a ranking exercise; it is placing an external reference in front of your internal decisions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And in Spain that mirror returns a surprising picture. The Sector Ratios published by the Bank of Spain show how profitability is distributed within one and the same industry. In the wholesale of computer equipment (CNAE group 465), 2023 base year, gross operating profit over sales stands at 1.18% in the lower quartile, 4.63% at the median and 10.86% in the upper quartile<\/strong>. Same industry, same suppliers, same legislation \u2014 and a margin that multiplies ninefold.<\/p>\n

This is no quirk of that particular activity code: it is the Spanish pattern. The Observatory of Productivity and Competitiveness of the BBVA Foundation and Ivie has calculated that the productivity of the Spanish economy as a whole would rise by 4.9% if lagging companies simply reached the median of their own sector<\/strong>. Not the median of the best performers: the median. What that means for you is simple and rather encouraging: most of the distance separating you from the most profitable companies in your sector is not explained by the sector, but by management. And management can be changed.<\/p>\n

What benchmarking is and what it is not<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The concept was born at Xerox out of a fright: the company saw its share of the photocopier market fall from 86% in 1974 to 17% in 1984, faced with Japanese manufacturers selling below what it cost Xerox to produce. It stripped rival products down piece by piece to understand their costs, and then compared its own processes with those of companies in other industries that ran them better.<\/strong> Robert C. Camp, an engineer at the firm, turned that into a method and published it in 1989: the systematic search for the best practices that lead to superior performance.<\/p>\n

The difference from what many companies call \u00abanalysing the competition\u00bb is one of depth. Knowing that a competitor has grown by 15% is competitor analysis. Working out how much of that came from price, how much from volume and how much from an acquisition, and what they had to build internally to achieve it, is benchmarking.<\/strong> The first describes; the second explains. And you can only act on what you can explain.<\/p>\n

There are four ways of doing it, and they do not compete with one another.<\/p>\n