This article was first published in Harvard Business Review and is available via subscription.
BCG’s Ulrich Pidun, Valentín Szekasy, Barbora Havelková, and Adam Job studied more than 10,000 companies over 20 years to understand how companies can build lasting value without growth. They found 57 firms with near-zero revenue growth whose TSR outperformed the market. Notably, these companies do not conform to a single profile: they sell to consumers and businesses, offer products and services, and are in a wide variety of industries.
In this article, the authors discuss four strategies that these businesses used to outperform in the absence of revenue growth: the asset-light play, the gross margin play, the balance sheet play, and the dividend play. They also explore how companies can address the challenges of low-growth strategies—even turning them into powerful catalysts for innovation.