This paper approaches the question: what are the factors that discriminate between positive and negative companies' performance, when in turbulent environment? Aimed in achieving this goal a study was conducted involving Brazilian companies in manufacturing industry that were active in the period comprised between 1996 to 2001, characterized by intense turbulence in national and worldwide macroeconomic scenes. A discriminant function was proposed to measure and analyze the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables, comprised by information about competitive environment, strategic orientation and economic context. As results variables risk exposition, long term debt and market share were identified as the factors that discriminate between positive and negative financial performance.
strategic orientation; environment; performance; competition; discriminant analysis
