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For decades, financing constraints have been a major obstacle to corporate performance. Volumes have been written about the probable factors that can help firms alleviate such financial constraints. Nonetheless, empirical evidence concerning the various perspectives on how inventory control may influence financing constraints has been surprisingly scant. Using the resource- and region-based view as theoretical lenses, this study seeks to estimate the relationship between lean inventory, regional financial technology (fintech) and financing constraints.

Utilizing a large-scale sample of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China's manufacturing sector, the authors empirically test their hypotheses by using hierarchical linear regression models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects.

Results indicate that firms with higher levels of inventory leanness and those located in more fintech-developed regions are less likely to encounter financing constraints. Furthermore, inventory leanness and regional fintech ecosystem development interact with each other to mitigate financing constraints. Moreover, inventory leanness significantly decreases firms' financing constraints when the regional fintech ecosystem is highly developed.

The present research contributes to the literature on the interface of supply chain management and financial management. It also provides managerial implications for policymakers and SME stakeholders.

This study aims to analyse the impact of the degree of internationalisation (DOI) on firm performance (FP), with the moderating role of organisational slack resources, namely, absorbed slack human resources, absorbed financial slack resources and unabsorbed slack resources, in the context of Asian emerging markets.

Data includes 45 companies and 225 observations in 2014–2018. The authors adopted the generalised least squares method to test their hypotheses.

DOI negatively influences FP, indicating that the link between DOI and FP is not U-shaped but relatively linear. Absorbed human resources and absorbed slack financial resources significantly enhance FP, absorbing resources associated with DOI and FP. Unabsorbed slack resources play a minor role in mitigating the deleterious impact of DOIs on FP.

Firms in an emerging market should begin exploring and expanding into overseas markets with characteristics similar to the domestic market. The firm should optimise the benefits of slack resources by appropriately allocating resources to strategic operations.

This study reveals the beneficial effect of organisational slack resources on the DOI-FP relationship via the lens of the resource-based view.

This study proposes a logic to enable strategic entrepreneurship for export firms through absorptive capacity and adaptive culture to capitalise on the knowledge intensity from internationalisation.

The study sample comprises 422 key role employees at 98 export firms in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The data are analysed using a structural equation model.

The results reveal that the firm's knowledge intensity may serve as a reservoir, absorbing and reconciling knowledge acquired from internationalisation and redistributing it to strategic entrepreneurship. A firm's absorptive capacity and adaptive culture can act as buffers, allowing internationalisation knowledge to permeate and transfer to administrative bodies and fostering strategic entrepreneurship.

This study proposes an integrated model of the relationship between the degree of internationalisation and strategic entrepreneurship through novel lenses of knowledge-based perspective with the organisational capabilities.

Drawn from the push–pull perspective, this research aims to identify the determinants of Chinese technology's outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) into the Eurasian region.

The authors argue that contrary to the extant literature, technology-driven OFDI from emerging-market multinationals (EMNEs) do not always seek developed countries, and EMNEs' technology investments in emerging economies are rising indicating that there are factors in these economies that can prove attractive. The authors recognize the influence of the macroeconomic environment and the interaction of home and host-country institutional contexts that influence the location choice of EMNEs technology-driven OFDI into other emerging economies, mediated by the industry sector and firm's ownership structure. The authors test our hypotheses using a sample of 1,656 observations of Chinese MNEs' tech-investments in the Eurasian region from 2005 to 2019.

The study results indicate that bilateral diplomatic relations pave the way of the host-country institutional environment for Chinese MNEs uncovering the role of the Chinese government as an OFDI facilitator. This study also unveils a lower technology level of the Chinese MNEs' investments in the Eurasian region connoting an interest in market opportunities exploitation through their existing technologies – through its comparative advantage in the global markets – rather than strategic assets acquisition aiming at augmenting their technological capabilities. This trend is similar to that of other major foreign direct investment (FDI) source countries.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the characteristics and the location choice of technology investments from EMNEs into other emerging economies that have received scant attention in the literature. In addition, it extends the institutional theory by analyzing how home-country institutions, through bilateral diplomatic relations, may smooth the host country institutional environment for home-country MNEs' foreign investments and contributes as well to the debate on the applicability of the existing theoretical framework in the case of emerging-market MNEs.

This study conceptualizes the digital transformation (DT) strategy in a supply chain context, identifies its drivers from intra- and inter-organizational perspectives and examines the effect of the DT strategy on the strategic agility and financial performance of Chinese manufacturing firms.

The authors constructed a theoretical model by synthesizing the diffusion of innovation and organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and provided a set of hypotheses. The authors empirically tested the arguments using partial least squares structural equation modeling using data from a sample of 200 manufacturing firms in China.

The findings indicate that while supply chain connectivity positively affects DT adoption and DT routinization, data analytics capability and organizational learning positively influence DT adoption but not DT routinization. The mediation analysis also shows that DT strategy has significant direct effects on financial performance and a stronger indirect influence on financial performance via improved strategic agility.

This study responds to repeated calls for a new understanding of supply chain DT strategy. In addition, the study offers important contributions to the literature by identifying the potential discord between the existing DT strategy and the supply chain context and proposes a new framework that provides essential theoretical underpinnings.

This study enriches the literature by conceptualizing and validating the dimensions, driving factors and performance implications of DT strategy in strategic supply chain management.

This study aims to explore how subsidiary capabilities collectively configure for performance. Additionally, it seeks to examine whether these configurations of capabilities can provide equifinal solutions through developing a comprehensive research framework that focuses on subsidiaries in China.

With a data set collected through a questionnaire from 172 Korean multinational enterprises (MNEs) in China, this study used a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to detect the capability conditions and configurations. These configurations represent combinations of various subsidiary capabilities linked to high performance.

This study identified several complex pathways with distinct configurations for high subsidiary performance. The findings demonstrate the importance of configurations over individual conditions. Thus, the results highlight that the effectiveness of diverse capabilities, which are widely believed to singularly contribute to the high performance of MNE subsidiaries, depends on how each combines with other capabilities. Overall, the findings provide a richer and fine-grained understanding of the role and relative importance of various forms of MNE subsidiary capabilities and how the joint effect of these subsidiaries contributes to high performance.

This study suggests that MNE managers should comprehensively understand how subsidiary capabilities are configured to produce subsidiary performance outcomes. This specifically illustrates the importance of understanding the mutually conflicting yet collectively exhaustive results of multi-selective solutions and aims to align with China’s industrial and regional heterogeneity.

By examining the role of MNE subsidiary capability configurations, which may collectively influence the subsidiary’s performance, this study contributes to the literature. It elucidates how MNE subsidiaries may achieve superior performance by developing and possessing various capabilities tailored to the local context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mechanisms of cultural distance in the base of Chinese Service Multi-National Enterprise (MNE) settings. When attempting to enter overseas markets, many service MNEs face challenges caused by the cultural distance between the home and host countries. Culture distance attracts much attention in academia and industry. However, there are few empirical works to examine how cultural distance affects customer orientation strategies in a global supply chain. This paper aims to answer the following research question: How is the effect of cultural distance on customer acquisition and customer retention strategies, and the effect of customer orientation strategies on the performance of service-oriented MNEs controlled by Chinese capital along the Belt and Road Initiative?

This paper examines the effect of cultural distance on the customer acquisition strategy and customer retention strategy, and the effect of customer orientation strategies on the performance of Chinese Service MNEs. A large-scale empirical study of Chinese Service MNEs operating in overseas markets is performed and questionnaires were distributed and collected. This paper uses Hofstede's method (Hofstede, 2010), Schwartz's method (Schwartz, 2003) and House et al.'s method (House et al., 2004) to calculate cultural distance. By using each kind of method, this study calculates the absolute culture distance and relative culture distance respectively.

The results suggest that cultural distance negatively affects customer orientation strategy, customer acquisition strategy positively affects performance and the interaction of customer acquisition and customer retention positively affects performance.

This study aims to contribute to the existing literature with a more fine-grained understanding of the inclusion of customer orientation strategy of Chinese Service MNEs in global supply chains.

The findings outline several important implications that Chinese Service MNEs seeking to expand to overseas markets.

This paper contributes a novel, combined perspective of culture distance and customer orientation strategy.