Internationalization of Chinese Pharmaceutical Firms-Strategies and Drivers

Investigating how pharmaceutical firms from emerging economies internationalize themselves to meet the knowledge- and investment-intensive challenges of pharmaceutical industry has become an inviting topic for both academia and industry. This paper explores the internationalization strategies and driving factors of Chinese pharmaceutical firms. Through applying text analytics, four internationalization patterns of Chinese pharmaceutical firms are identified, namely, (1) market seeking by the state-owned; (2) opportunity exploring by the emerging-private; (3) culture penetration by TCM firms; and (4) global integration by CROs. It shows that the internationalization of Chinese pharmaceutical firms is driven by three key factors: firm ownership, business scope and value chain positioning. This study attempts not only to provide empirical evidence of internationalization of Chinese pharmaceutical firms, but also to contribute to the field of study on corporate internationalization in the complex-system sector.

Getting all motives right: a holistic approach to internationalization motives of companies

Purpose – This paper presents a framework for an improved understanding of actual internationalization motives. Answers to a key question in IB studies – why companies internationalize – contain considerable flaws. There are theoretical, disciplinary and methodological reasons for this state of affairs. In practice, the lacking attention for motivational constellations has serious repercussions for the theoretical sophistication of IB studies, lowering its managerial relevance. Design/methodology/approach – Managers are confronted with many internationalization considerations simultaneously and, therefore, often have difficulty in recognizing themselves in extant approaches. The abstractions that many textbooks and academic papers present on the why question of corporate internationalization defy reality in case the various motivational trade-offs that managers face are not adequately addressed. This contribution presents a framework that is based on the identification of a number of motivational tensions that define the outcome of the actual internationalization strategies of companies: between intrinsic and extrinsic motives, between strategic intent and realization and between tactical and strategic considerations. Findings – Dealing with these tensions at the same time provides a strong ground for explaining particular outcomes of the internationalization process in degrees of international coordination and integration. Practical implications – The practical implication of the approach is a new conceptual framework that help scholars and managers understand complex configurations of internationalization motives better and thus come up with more realistic descriptions of what has actually influenced companies to adopt a particular internationalization strategy. Originality/value – The paper presents a completely new combination of models to document the motivations and consequently the internationalization trajectories of companies. It is, however, also well founded in the literature, but it presents a fundamental account of some serious flaws in IB theory and practice.

Does corporate internationalization contribute to companies’ operational efficiency? Evidence form Russian companies

Authors: Dmitry Y. Shcherbakov Corporate international diversification has become a widely used growth strategy. However, the majority of scientific researches insist on its value-destroying pattern. As most of these researches are focused on companies from the developed countries the experience of companies from developing countries remains fairly unexplored.The current paper proposes an estimation of internalization-performance relationship from operational efficiency prospect. The proposed model has been empirically tested on a sample of large Russian companies. The results identify a non-linear U-shape relationship between a degree of internationalization and companies’ return on capital employed. Overall for the majority of companies international diversification refers to diminish in operational efficiency.