A company cannot survive for long without at least one competitive

IMO C

Waiting for OA.

Also please mention the source.

Thanks
Varun

A.For a company to survive in the long run, it needs to imitate the competitive advantage of all of its competitors, in addition to maintaining at least one competitive advantage.
If that company imitates the competitive advantage of its competitors, that competitive advantage will no longer be its competitive advantage over the rest of the companies in the industry.

For example, A has the competitive advantage over others in the industry. This means that only A has this advantage. However, B copies this advantage, and A is no longer the only company that owns this advantage. In other words, this advantage isn't the competitive advantage any more.

B.No two companies producing the same products or services can survive in a marketplace in the long run.
If these 2 companies have their own competitive advantage, then they could still survive in the long run.

C.A company needs to regularly replace existing competitive advantages with new competitive advantages in order to survive in the long run
Correct. In case that imitating is so easy, in order to survive in the long run, a company needs to create new competitive advantages. Just satisfies the fact that it has its own competitive advantage over others, it will survive for a long time.

D.If two companies in an industry try to imitate each other’s competitive advantages, then both the companies will not be able to survive in the long run.
What happened if these 2 companies try to create new competitive advantages?

E.In the future, it is highly unlikely that imitating the competitive advantage of competitors will become difficult.
The passage mentioned nothing about the difficulty of imitating in the future.

Answer should be C
As every time a company would have new competitive advantage over other companies , that's at least condition is satisfied along with Imitateing .

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Option B: company can still copy/imitate and have their own CA also.
Option E:
Incorrect - Against given information. Argument just talk about present. It doesn't predict about future.

I understood why C is the correct answer but I couldn't understand that why is option A wrong.

Option A is wrong because a part of the answer says company needs to imitate from its competitors which is never mentioned in the passage

In option A, it says that a company needs to imitate the competitive advantage of all of its competitors. It is nowhere stated in the passage that a company needs to imitate the competitive advantage of all its competitors. It just says that the company needs one advantage over all the others.

According to my opinion, A looks like the correct answer. Please help in eliminating that option.

why not option A. Option A is much more suitable???

I see a few problems with option A. First, let's unpack the passage and find the 'breadcrumbs':



Okay. So:
--A company MUST HAVE at least one competitive advantage over the rest of its competitors to survive in an industry.
--Competitive advantages are now easier to imitate than they've ever been.
--It's very hard to build MORE than one competitive advantage.

Okay, so I know my answer needs to be in the 'realm' of these bread crumbs: having a comp. advantage, surviving, and other companies copying that comp. advantage... which makes surviving harder (because apparently LOSING the advantage IS 'death.' per the first breadcrumb).



This is not in the bread crumbs, so it's gone.


I don't know if this is true. Technology has made imitation easier now, but that doesn't mean it will always be that way. Eliminate E.



This at least talks about the breadcrumbs, but we can't say that attempts at mutual imitation causes 'death.' For one 'try' does not mean 'succeed.' We'd need to know one of them succeeds. Two, there's no law saying that a new competitive advantage can't be found if the one you had gets successfully imitated.

So down to A and C.



The thing that gets me here is the 'need' to imitate advantages. We're never told that another company having a comp. advantage that you don't means your death. If Company A has a comp advantage over B on price, and Company B has a competitive advantage over A on quality, Company A does not need to imitate B to survive (though they may want to... but that's not relevant).



This seems like the answer (though I don't love it, for 'GMAT purity' reasons. Does anyone know the source?) Since imitation is easier than ever, *someone* out there will eventually imitate a company's competitive advantage [This is the inference that feels a little bit like a 'jump' to me]. And we can't really have more than one. So we need to be generating new ones so that when the one we have gets imitated we can survive in the long run.