of the criteria for partner selection decisions as the performance of “3” and Vodafone’s
alliance strategies is intricate to assess. First, because limited time has pasted since the
strategies were implemented. The market is still characterized by uncertainty and the per-
formance implications may not have materialized yet. Second, there are no competitors to
compare with. Both “3” and Vodafone has been criticized for their huge spending on 3G
licenses combined with the slow service uptake in the market. Yet, lately many voices are
recognizing that “3” is rapidly gaining market shares and has signed up 3.2 million sub-
scribers globally. Also Vodafone’s Live! portal has recently experienced a significant up-
take. However, whether “3” and Vodafone will benefit from their alliance strategies, and
to which degree such benefits will also be available to later-entering competitors, remains
to be seen. Thus, the results of this study are very indicative. Yet, we can conclude that
by allying with partners with relatively weak resource endowments “3” succeeded in be-
ing the first-mover in the emergent market and is rapidly seizing market shares and Voda-
fone succeeded being the first operator to launch an extensive 2.5G service platform for
data-intensive services.
Financial Times in a special report (December 5 2000) wrote: “It is a measure of
how far they have slipped that many of the leading Japanese and Korean manufacturers
are choosing to team up with weaker European players to help crack the international
market”. This statement reflects a general fallacy, namely that allying with weak partners
is necessarily a sign of weakness. We provide a framework emphasizing the changing
relative importance of resource endowments and aligned aspiration levels in partner se-
lection decisions. Yet, more work is needed to outline the specific relationship among
these variables over time. Also the variables “resource strength” and “aspiration levels”
need to be measured more stringently as we simplify our analysis by using market share
and selected key resources to form a measure of resource strength and a firm’s potential
net gains from market entry as a measure of the aspiration level. We also concentrate on
dyadic relationships. However, in dyadic relationships there is more often harmony be-
tween private and common benefits as aspirations are relatively easy to align for the part-
ners’ specific purpose compared to multifirm alliances. Thus, aspirations may have more
importance in multifirm alliances than it is argued in this paper. Furthermore, we only
present indicative empirical data from newspaper articles, case studies and financial re-
22