Exploiting global opportunities: A future-oriented strategic perspective for multinational corporations

The international marketing environment will continue to have changes which pose risks to the growth and expansion of MNCs. The source of these environmental risks may be individual countries responding to internal political pressures. Alternatively, the risks may originate from concerted efforts by countries in a region to link together, promote and share the economic outputs of the region. The success of MNCs will, therefore, depend on their response to the political pressures of each country where the risks are countryspecific. Response to economic pressures will determine the success of MNCs where intercountry dependencies and conflicts are the source of risk. Future-oriented strategies which an MNC may use to cope with environmental risks should consider the source of risks and the nature of the MNC. MNCs which are flexible in structure, mobile, clientspecific and labour-intensive should define their strategic business units as countries. Such MNCs can adapt quickly to rapid political changes in each nation and can tailor reactive strategies to the political needs of each country. MNCs which are immobile, inflexible and dependent on production on a large scale should define strategic business units as economic regions. The nature of such MNCs requires proactive regional strategies which emphasize inter-country dependencies.