The 1997 foreign exchange crisis was attributed primarily to large corporations' excessive debt management, owner-management, growth-oriented management, and government-business collusion, and under the IMF regime, large enterprises were required to undertake fundamental corporate restructuring. In such a business environment, presenting a direction for corporate growth that enables sound growth is a critically important task, yet this is impossible without an understanding of corporate growth. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of corporate growth by identifying the factors and patterns of individual firm growth through analysis of U.S. corporate financial data that reveal the growth processes of various firms over a long period. Corporate growth was analyzed by industry, and growth factors and growth patterns determining the two pillars of corporate growth—growth rate and profitability—were analyzed according to industry growth and changes in competitive structure. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows. First, industries with low capital intensity and high growth rates showed easier market entry and faster changes in competitive market structure. Second, depending on changes in market structure and industry growth rates, the relationship between growth rate and profitability changes—specifically, as competition intensifies and growth decelerates, the positive relationship between growth rate and profitability weakens, and in highly competitive industries, this relationship weakens further and even becomes negative. Third, in the analysis of the relationship between corporate growth and growth factors, the growth factors determining growth rate consistently differed between capital-intensive or technology-intensive industries and other industries. In capital-intensive and technology-intensive industries, facility investment and technology investment, respectively, were shown to be the growth factors. However, the growth factors determining profitability were found to be unrelated to industry characteristics. Fourth, the test of the possibility that firms discontinue operations because they adopt growth strategies that do not fit their growth patterns revealed that the likelihood of firm discontinuation is higher when growth patterns and growth strategies are misaligned with respect to growth rate rather than profitability. Fifth, business diversification, which is considered an important growth strategy, was found to serve as a growth strategy in some industries depending on industry characteristics. The results of this study, which analyzed the growth factors and growth patterns determining profitability and growth rate, can present appropriate growth patterns for individual firms, thereby contributing to business management practice, and can also contribute to research related to firm value, earnings forecasting, and earnings response coefficients as they relate to corporate profitability and growth rate.