1 International Competitiveness and Technological Innovation. The Inditex case 1988-2007 Luis Alonso Álvarez Universidad de A Coruña From its headquarters in the Arteixo town council —near A Coruña (Spain)—, the hold- ing company Inditex manages a business organization that is made up of 174 own compa- nies, 5 shared risk companies, and 12 franchises (as a whole, almost 200 worldwide, as can be seen in Table 1). 1 Inditex has become the biggest company in Galicia, surpassing the multinational Citroën. It is also one of the biggest non-finance companies in Spain, not only in billing and profits, but also in terms of any other business parameter. In international terms, it constitutes the second textile operator, only surpassed by the American Gap, whose profits are double, and it is ahead of the European Hennes & Moritz (see Table 2). It has maintained a very solid and stable growth for the last three decades, something that its competitors seem not to have achieved. It exported, during 2007, the most recent data, 63% of its production, although the bulk of its sales were concentrated in the European Union (42%, excluding Spain) as can be seen in Table 3. 2 Its world market access strategies (espe- cially its flexibility in the production and the distribution of the product) have been imitated by many other companies and they are nowadays being studied in business schools of pres- tigious universities. 3 For all of these reasons, Inditex constitutes an indispensable field of study in order to identify and to analyse strategies, especially with reference to information and communication technologies (ICTs), which permit companies to surpass competitors 1 Data from 31 January 2007. See Inditex (2007). 2 Inditex (2007). 3 Recently, various representatives from universities and business schools, among them Columbia (New York), IESE and ESADE (Barcelona), INSEAD (Fontaineblau) and IMD (Switzerland) analyzed its particular expansion and management style at its headquarters in Arteixo (A Coruña). See El Pais (Spanish edition), 23/06/2007.