Assessment of Economic Sustainability of Industrial Enterprises as a Basis for Decision-Making on the Formation of Strategic Alliances

Abstract

The article is devoted to the assessment of the economic sustainability of industrial enterprises in the context of decision-making on the formation of strategic alliances. The growing need for well-founded decisions in the selection of strategic partners necessitates the improvement of methodological approaches to assessing the economic sustainability of enterprises. The authors propose a methodological approach involving the integral assessment of economic sustainability based on five functional blocks: financial and economic, production and technological, market, innovation and organizational, and adaptive. For a comprehensive characteristic of economic sustainability, the authors propose using Integral Index of Economic Sustainability (IES) and Index of Structural Balance (IBS), which enable the assessment of not only the overall level of economic sustainability but also the coherence of the development of its functional components. For the interpretation of the results, a positioning matrix for enterprises in the “IES–IBS” coordinate system is proposed, which allows for the differentiation of enterprises based on a combination of their economic sustainability level and its structural balance. The methodological approach was tested using open data from the financial statements of five Ukrainian enterprises in the mining and metallurgical industry, which operation is characterized by high capital intensity, heavy dependence on external markets, and high exposure to economic risks. The results confirmed the applicability of the proposed approach and demonstrated that enterprises with similar values of IES may differ significantly in the level of structural balance of their economic sustainability. This expands the informational and analytical support for decision-making on the formation of strategic alliances, and lays the groundwork for the further development of methods for assessing the economic sustainability of enterprises.