As the saying goes: knowing yourself is equally important as knowing your enemy. Competitive Intelligence is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external information that can affect your company's plans, decisions, and operations. 
Put another way, CI is the process of enhancing marketplace competitiveness through a greater -- yet unequivocally ethical -- understanding of a firm's competitors and the competitive environment. 
Specifically, it is the legal collection and analysis of information regarding the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of business competitors, conducted by using information databases and other "open sources" and through ethical inquiry. CI enables senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long-term business strategies. Effective CI is a continuous process involving the legal and ethical collection of information, analysis that doesn't avoid unwelcome conclusions, and controlled dissemination of actionable intelligence to decision makers.  

1.	Enterprise's basic information: such as the company's address, contact information, nature, business scope, name of legal representative, registered capital, the approving authority, distribution of share ownership, associated organizations. 

2.	Business background: the company's history and evolution, affiliation, scope of business change, shareholder information and curriculum vitae of the principal responsible persons, events, political support. 

3.	The company's core product development, production and sales situation: cost performance, efficiency, technology leadership, productivity, goals and reality production capacity (the number of factories and production lines and specifications), sales and marketing policies. 

4.	The company's development goals and strategic: production plan and sales volume, profit targets, mainly in construction and production projects, strategic model - cost leadership or technical lead. 

5.	Marketing: sales volume, sales regions, key markets, inventory, customer type, amount and distribution, marketing and marketing management policy framework, strategy, account management, dead Account Management etc.