The low level of competitiveness manifests itself as the inability of a firm to expand and meet market demand; the Ecuadorian hat industry shows the case in that despite having been maintained for more than a century, today it faces foreign rivals with diversified products that form local niches, displace the retail producer, and are built under unfavorable commercial relations for the artisan felt transformer who continues to use methods and tools typical of the colony. The production and commercial chain schemes of the felt hat and its main raw material highlight the organizational structure of the industrial producer, who focuses his efforts on the foreign market, in addition to the contradictory reality of the artisan who sells in the local market, and thus manage to exhibit the main limitations to access the international market due to the lack of technification in the transformation process of the raw material, which together with an intricate network of productive-family relationships on which they are based, prevent them from reaching adequate levels of competitiveness.
