industry life cycle; entry, exit; network; vertical relations

This paper addresses the problem of the general validity of models of the industry life cycle, which have been proposed to analyse the long-term evolution of many industries, exhibiting a typical pattern of shakeout. We study a case of non shake-out in the commercial jet aero-engine industry, marked by a small number of entry events distributed over 40 years of industry evolution, by no exits and by a resulting slowly increasing number of firms. We argue that the vertical structure of the industry, as represented by the network of vertical relations between aero-engine suppliers and aircraft manufacturers, "regulated" the process of entry and exit and posed the conditions for a non shakeout to take place.