Paths and geographic scope of international expansion across industries

Chang Hoon Oh, Minyoung Kim and Jiyoung Shin

International Business Review, 2019, vol. 28, issue 3, 560-574

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate how firms’ international expansion paths and their geographic scope differ across industries, with longitudinal data from 1999 to 2008 for Fortune Global 500 firms. We first classify firms into three generic paths of international expansion based on the industry characteristics (i.e., institution-driven, capability-driven, and linkage-driven). We then investigate the differences in three generic international expansion paths and geographic scope with descriptive and growth curve analyses. The results show that firms operating in an institution-driven industry mostly expand their upstream activity internationally, but their geographic scope is limited. In contrast, those firms in a capability-driven industry mainly expand their downstream international activities, potentially beyond a regional geographic boundary. Firms in a linkage-driven industry likely coordinate both upstream and downstream activities internationally, but with larger geographic scope in downstream activities than upstream activities. Thus, firms across industries have taken distinctive paths of international expansion with substantially different geographic scope of operation.

Keywords: International expansion; Geographic scope; Industry; Upstream; Downstream; CSA/FSA; Value configuration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593117306340
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iburev:v:28:y:2019:i:3:p:560-574

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/133/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/133/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.ibusrev.2018.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

International Business Review is currently edited by P. Ghauri

More articles in International Business Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().