Motives behind purchasing consortia

Although purchasing cooperation between independent companies has been practiced for a long time, the phenomenon is not extensively researched. Especially purchasing consortiums formed by industrial companies have received relatively little attention in literature of the discipline. In this paper the key results of the larger study concerning industrial consortium purchasing are presented: the study was recently conducted and tested in Finnish machine manufacturing industry. The objective of this paper is to find out the motives behind purchasing consortia. As foundations for the empirical study, three theories explaining why companies form purchasing consortia are presented. The results of the study indicate that two main reasons for the companies to cooperate on purchasing are the expected cost savings and the collection of information on supply markets.