Is it ever possible to compete with large companies?

There are a number of multinational companies which are considered to be wealthier than several small or medium sized countries. This raises one question that if it is ever possible for newly established companies to compete with large players in their fields. My answer to this question is pessimistic that there is little chance for small companies to overtake large companies in the same fields. I think that there is one classic example. The developer of AlphaGo, DeepMind was bought by Alphabet (Google). Before the acquisition, DeepMind has advanced knowledge and development in the field of AI, especially machine learning; however, since Alphabet has enormous resources, it is able to acquire DeepMind before DeepMind is capable of using its technologies for commercial uses and generating profits. From this case, we can see that when small companies are not able to transform its advanced technology for commercial uses and effectively generate profits, large companies can very easily acquire this type of small companies and gain the advanced technological and developers.

In addition, small companies have another major disadvantages, many of them need initial investment to start up their businesses. Once they have good business models or advanced products and seek for investment, they are very likely to gain investment successfully; however, some of their initial investment may come from their large competitors in their fields. When their business models have been proved to be successful, the large competitors will still not be affected as they are shareholders of these small companies and have great chances to acquire these companies; if these small businesses fail, the large competitors maintain their dominations in their fields and the losses from the investment in these small businesses are only an insignificant amount compared to the revenues generated from monopolistic power.

Small businesses do have their unique advantages compared with large companies that they are far more flexible and easy to change their strategies. Moreover, the networking and communication are clearer and simpler than those in large companies, which makes their business activities more effective. However, such management difficulties in large companies are due to the complicated networking between human labours, especially when more people are hired, more conflicts of interests take place within their companies. If a large proportion of human labours can be replaced by machinery, as machinery does not have an issue of conflicts of interests, the machines would only serve the interests of the companies, so large companies can improve their productivities and efficiency to a significant degree.

I think that there is only one chance for small companies to compete with large companies in the same sectors that they can only compete with large companies before they use machinery for the majority of their productions. After full transformation, small companies lose almost all their advantages to large companies and become impossible to compete with large companies in the same fields.