Even though strong competition in an industry in general favors the formation of alliances, competition between partners is a difficult task to handle when discussing cooperation. The objective of this qualitative case study is to investigate how cooperation is used to gain access to resources and to increase resource flexibility in a highly competitive fragmented industry, such as the printing industry. Further this paper investigates the perceived level of competition between cooperating partners and how this affects the possibility to cooperate.This study gives indications on both the need and possibilities to engage in cooperation with competitors for small and medium sized printing houses. To compete effectively the printing houses have formed cooperations with companies that either have complementary resources or can provide extended resource capacity. The results indicate that forming cooperations is important for increasing the resource flexibility in the printing industry, a traditional industry with economics of scale in production and immense fixed costs and investment needs. When cooperation between partners is strong, the level of competition between partners tends to be perceived as weak, which can be attributed to the high level of trust needed for cooperation to be formed in the first place. The results also indicate that whenever the competition increases in a strong cooperation the cooperation most often ends in dissolution. In other words companies in the printing industry tend to have strong cooperation with a few close partners who they can trust, which makes the competitive situation between partners seem weak. This study indicates the difficulties in having a strong cooperation with companies regarded as competitors. This study indicates the difficulties among SMEs in having a strong cooperation with companies regarded as competitors.