Author
Listed:
- Anthony Goerzen
(University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada)
- Shige Makino
(Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong)
Abstract
This paper extends Chang's (1995) sequential investment theory to include multinational corporations (MNCs) in service industries, given this sector's large and growing impact on the global economy. To facilitate an examination of service MNC internationalization patterns, we develop a new typology of service investment (i.e., core-global, related-local, unrelated-global, and unrelated-local) based on business relatedness and location-specificity. We test this typology on a sample of large Japanese trading companies; our results suggest that the initial investments of service MNCs are closely related to their core businesses and are less location-specific, but that subsequent investments are less related to firms' core services and are more location-specific – a pattern similar to the traditional view on manufacturing MNCs. We extend our analysis to examine several case studies to provide a richer context for these findings. In addition, we examine the performance implications of internationalization. Our findings suggest that firms that internationalize through early investments that are closely related to their core activities outperform those in unrelated businesses over time, but that this performance gap between related and unrelated foreign investments diminishes in more advanced stages of internationalization. Journal of International Business Studies (2007) 38, 1149–1169; doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400310
Suggested Citation
Anthony Goerzen & Shige Makino, 2007.
"Multinational corporation internationalization in the service sector: a study of Japanese trading companies,"
Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 38(7), pages 1149-1169, December.
Handle:
RePEc:pal:jintbs:v:38:y:2007:i:7:p:1149-1169
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:jintbs:v:38:y:2007:i:7:p:1149-1169. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.