In the present globalized competitive environment, companies are continuoulsy pushed to establish strategic alliances and strategic relationship networks to complement their resources. The research studied how the strategic implications of alliances and other strategic relationships, in the case of companies in a strategic group, complement the traditional analysis about the strategic implications of the organizational and macroenvironmental factors.The study was sophisticated through the introduction of the strategic block concept created by Nohria & Garcia-Pont (1991), that complements the strategic groups study, and whose deeper specificity improves the study of the organizational strategic performance of companies located in groups and envolved in strategic relationship networks. The investigation envolved four companies,including a strategic group that simultaneously is a strategic block, observed in a specific scope of the Brazilian ready-to-drink industrialized orange juice subsector up to the end of 2001. The research was descriptive and exploratory, with a mainly positivist methodological vision. It is a multiple case study since it envolves several companies, and it complemented, through the relational approach, the traditional approach of opportunities and threats to the surpassing of the mobility barriers for the inter-group migration of companies. In order to answer the main question, first a secondary reasearch was made, based on bilbiographical and documental research. The constructs for the analysis of the strategic implications of networks and blocks for strategic groups were indicated, and were used in the analysis of strategic groups through the relational perspective. The relational implications to the threats faced by the companies of the focal group in the traditional perspective were indicated. In the following stage, the primary research was accomplished, and its results were: 1) it rectified, from two to three, the number of strategic groups in the sector analysed in the secondary research; 2) it showed that strategic alliances and relationship networks give birth to threats and opportunities to the strategic performance of the company that are hardly identified through the traditional approach of the performance analysis; 3) the alliance networks of a company located in a strategic group may enable it to surpass the intergroupal barriers, since they provide the company with capacities foreign to its core business; 4) in the case of strategic alliances with key clients - very relevant in the case of the analysed economic sector - this capacity of surpassing barriers may be modulated by the way the company positions itself in the relationship. Four recommendations for future research are proposed.