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The chapter provides an economic explanation and perspectivation of strategic asset seeking of multinational enterprises from emerging economies (EMNEs) as a prominent feature of today’s global economy.

The authors apply and extend the “springboard perspective.” This perspective submits that EMNEs acquire strategic assets in developed markets primarily for use in their home markets.

The authors succumb that the springboard perspective is alluring theoretically as well as empirically as it suggests that when EMNEs acquire strategic assets, they experience liabilities of foreignness (LOF) that are low relative to those of MNEs from developed markets. The authors concede to this LOF asymmetry but also point out that liabilities of outsidership (LOO) can offset or weaken the home-market advantage of some EMNEs when competing with MNEs.

LOO appears as the more relevant concept to use when explaining strategic asset seeking of EMNEs. A set of propositions are formulated to guide empirical testing.

The insights gained from using the springboard perspective and the LOO concept are non-trivial: They basically predict future dominance of ‘insider’ EMNEs at the expense of MNEs from developed markets.

To understand the rationale for foreign direct investment of Chinese electronic companies, their location decisions and entry mode choices

Secondary data on foreign direct investment of the top 100 companies in China’s electronics industry are analysed. The first part covers an exploratory analysis of the industry and the second part presents a comparative longitudinal analysis of three case studies of representative companies: Haier, Huawei, and Lenovo.

The three key findings are: (1) market-seeking is the primary motivation for foreign direct investment of Chinese companies in the electronics industry, yet the strategic-asset-seeking gains importance as the internationalization of the company advances; (2) foreign investment path normally starts at adjacent foreign markets, but more distant markets are gradually targeted and become more important for the company; (3) wholly owned investments are the preferred market entry modes in the international expansion.

This research is based on secondary data, and more in-depth, interview-based studies are needed to explore the perceptions of decision-makers, and a plethora of contextual factors, which result in specific market entry decisions. As only the 100 largest companies were studied, future research should put under scrutiny also internationalization of smaller firms.

Implications of such findings are discussed in the light of classic internationalization theories as well as the current research on internationalization of companies from emerging/developing countries.

Provides an account of foreign direct investment in a context of a substantial and growing importance for the practice of international business, and identifies an agenda for promising future scholarly inquiries.

Outward foreign direct investments (FDI) by Turkish firms in the new millennium show intriguing geographic distribution pattern and unlike the predictions of classical theories of FDI. In this study we contribute by linking the observed pattern of outward FDI with Turkish firms’ motivation for investment across national borders. We enrich research by collecting and analyzing FDI motivation data at the firm-level for a very important but less researched developing country: Turkey. Content analysis of text material on the foreign investments made by 211 Turkish firms reveals that Turkish firms primarily perform FDI in European developed countries for reasons other than conventional, namely, market- and strategic-asset-seeking motivations. More importantly, Turkish firms seem to be using the European countries to (1) present themselves as a European Union company, (2) make use of special features of these countries to expand their businesses within and to other countries and, (3) make use of the favorable tax treatment policies available to foreign investors. Surprisingly, our analysis shows that in spite of its small size, the Netherlands is a preferred destination for Turkish FDI over other Western European countries due to its strategic location and favorable investment policies.

Current gazelle and high growth firm (HGF) research provides relatively little systematic knowledge if, how, why firm internationalization facilitates accelerated growth. This chapter aims at providing such an insight by addressing the following three questions: (1) What is the evidence of internationalization as an determinant of HGF; (2) How does internationalization facilitates fast growth?; (3) What do we know about the circumstance under which internationalization contributes to HGF? The chapter concludes that while there is clear evidence that internationalization and its different modes can be important determinants of accelerated firm growth, our knowledge remains limited on how different circumstances of the firm at the micro-, meso- and macro-level interact to condition growth opportunities through internationalization.

Purpose – The main aim of this chapter is to identify the factors that motivate outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Turkey to EU countries, looking into the problem at the firm level with a marketing focus, trying to understand whether or not there are any Turkey-specific prevailing marketing-related drivers.

Design/methodology/approach – With a distinction between developed and emerging/developing countries and their MNCs’ role in world trade and FDI, the literature review focuses on micro-view motives, particularly marketing-related ones, rather than macro-view motives which are mostly studied in the literature. Based on the literature review, the importance of Turkish MNCs and their increasing role in the world trade is briefly summarized.

Looking into the problem at the firm level with a marketing focus, a series of in-depth interviews with top executives were conducted as an exploratory study in order to explore and understand the role of marketing-related motives in Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) decisions of Turkish MNCs. For this purpose, 10 in-depth interviews with 13 top executives were conducted with tailor-made questionnaires.

Findings – The analysis of interviews revealed some different OFDI drivers and motivations for the Turkish MNCs compared to the factors mentioned in the literature, as well as iterating some common motives with the OFDI literature. Parallel to the FDI literature, it is observed that the Turkish MNCs mainly started their internationalization attempts by taking somewhat less risky and smaller steps.

As a result of qualitative research, the support is provided for the theoretical perspective that micro variables are more important than macro variables for Emerging Multinationals (EMNCs), particularly for Turkish MNCs; therefore, some Turkey-specific motives were also identified.

Originality/value of chapter – Although there is a consensus in recent literature on the most persistent group of motives influencing OFDI activities of EMNCs in developed countries, the underlying marketing-related objectives which are crucial to sustain competitive advantage have not been analysed and investigated sufficiently. This study is an attempt to fill this gap by identifying the most persistent marketing-related motives and give important insights about country-specific ones encouraging Turkish EMNCs to carry out OFDI in EU.

This study investigates how firms’ awareness of sustainability affects the revision of their internationalization strategy. Adopting a resource-based view (RBV) approach, the authors argue that sustainable-oriented firms have a higher propensity to de-internationalize (i.e., to go back to their home country) when confronted with the need to relocate foreign manufacturing subsidiaries, as the shortening of value chains would allow the reduction of transportation emissions and enhanced corporate image as green-oriented entities. Furthermore, the authors explore the role exerted by a stringent regulatory setting in the home country on the likelihood of de-internationalization. The empirical test conducted on a sample of relocations performed across European nations in 2002–2014 reveals that multinational enterprises (MNEs) – regardless of their sustainability orientation – have a higher probability to de-internationalize when their home countries have strict institutional contexts in place.

The increasing number of cases of developing country multinational enterprises (MNEs) buying assets from developed countries through merger and acquisition (M&A) calls for more systematic evidences on this area. As a typical and representative developing country, China has already drawn the world's attention with several high-profile cross-border M&As in recent years. By examining the recent evidences of Chinese outward M&A, this chapter reviews the main motivations of outward M&A among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs, and presents an overall picture of China's outward M&A in the last decade. In doing so, this chapter intends to explore the crucial role played by the Chinese government in orchestrating its internationalization activities and the long-term implications on the competitiveness of Chinese firms in the global marketplace.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.