The phrase "a severe competition" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a situation where there is intense rivalry or contest among participants, often in a competitive environment such as sports, business, or academics.
Example: "The annual science fair featured a severe competition among the top students from various schools."
Alternatives: "a fierce competition" or "a tough competition".
Darwin (Origin, chapter 4) envisaged speciation as the result of two processes: selection for diversification allowing the exploitation of previously unused opportunities, and the extinction of intermediate forms as a consequence of severe competition among these forms.
Netflix went from competing in an Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming blue ocean with little competition, to an environment of severe competition, since HBO launched HBO Now in April 2015 and many others followed since then.
Academic firms are or would be exposed to an economic environment, where success often means to cope with and to profit from mechanisms and forces of severe competition in a continuously globalizing world.
Costs for establishing as well as running land-based seawater farms are higher than for freshwater ponds and offshore mariculture which renders them less attractive in a market where there is severe competition on product prices.
Despite the potentially severe competition, they host a very diverse array of species.
This severe competition could be a powerful force driving the evolution of sperm size and could explain why male sperm in gonochoristic species are much larger than those of males in hermaphroditic species (Lamunyon and Ward 1999).
Thus, even though GrubHub is facing severe competition from many players while Yelp has a quasi-monopoly, the companies have similar market caps.
The company, a $1.7 million operation, was beset by shrinking resources, rising costs and severe competition from neighboring ballet companies.
Darwin wrote that: "these anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition".
