Restoring the Economic Power of Russia through OFDI Expansion

When enterprises enter a new country they face the challenge to develop their acquisition and distribution systems. In this way modern management concepts are exported. Today, managers of multinational companies are more specialized in segmenting their activities and in finding optimal location for increasingly specialized forms of activity being able to adopt their products to local markets. These technological and managerial efforts have been extended by political that provided a larger opening than in previously closed economies. FDI is one of the most efficient means by which emerging markets become integrated to the global economy while FDI provides capital, technology and management know-how required by the restructuring of firms in the host economies. The propose of the paper is to analyze the growing importance of OFDIs from emerging markets underlining the fact that, in recent years, middle and low income countries, such as Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Russia and South Africa, have become important in the global geography of capital flows. From among the BRIC countries, our paper will provide insights into the Russian economy, focusing on its goal of becoming a major outward investing country on a global scale. The expansion of Russian corporations to abroad, and particularly to Europe, raised many questions regarding the motivations behind their internationalization and led to a common acknowledged belief that they were tools of regaining political hegemony rather than pure economic entities. Given the complexity of the subject, the main objective of our paper is to explore trends for Russian OFDI and their impact upon the new balance of the global economic power.