Lessons learned from an unsuccessful "catching-up" in the automobile industry of Iran

In contrast to existing studies mostly investigating successful cases of technological catching-up, this paper aims to analyse a limited catch-up by an Iranian automobile firm. Using thematic analysis, and based on the con-ceptual framework developed in the literature review, the empirical data were coded and categorised into the themes and dimensions. The resulting contextualized framework, as one of the main contributions of this study, suggests how the certain sectoral environment of the automobile industry contributes to the lackluster perfor-mance of catching-up by the domestic firm. The sectoral environment (i.e. technological regimes, market re-gimes, and government policies) of Iran's automobile industry (IAI) is characterized by ineffective technology transfer, diverse technological areas, high tacit knowledge, the extensive backward linkages, high scale intensity, under-developed domestic supply chain, capital-goods attitude to the consumer goods, the oligopolistic struc-ture, and homogeneous market. This paper also identifies new catch-up's influencing factors (i.e. industrial strategy and structural issues) inductively emerged during the empirical data analysis. And finally, comparison of the automobile industry in Iran and a few Asian countries shows that local content requirements (LCRs) will not bring about indigenous development unless it is complemented by the export market discipline and scale economy.