The Intangible Assets of Korean Manufacturing Firms for Foreign Direct Investment

This paper attempts to apply the intangible assets approach to the emerging multinational enterprises of Korea. More specifically, it tries to empirically analyze whether Korean firms investing in foreign markets possess more advanced intangible assets than those investing only in the domestic market, and whether Korean firms exploit different types of tangible assets in different host regions. The following conclusions have been drawn by analyzing the data on Korea manufacturing firms listed on the Stock Exchange. First, firms investing in foreign markets possess more advanced intangible assets than domestic market-oriented ones. More specifically, firms investing in the Western developed region are shown to be superior in the economies of scale, R&D, advertising intensity, capital intensity, and interfirm linkages, whereas those investing in the Asian developing region are superior only in the economies of scale and organizational skills. This implies that Korean firms operating in developed countries seem to exploit a wider range of intangible assets to address intense competition and sophisticated demand in the host markets. And, when firms investing in the developed and developing regions are compared directly, the former group are found to exploit technological capability and interfirm linkages more intensively. Second, availability of internal funds and human capital intensity do not show statistical significances, implying that these abilities are not different between firms investing in foreign markets and the domestic market. Third, Korean multinational enterprises are more similar to Japanese than Western ones in terms that they actively exploit organizational skills and interfirm network. Nonetheless, these conclusions have been derived by analyzing the data on parent firms, based on the assumption that Korean overseas subsidiaries commonly share the intangible assets of their parents. This weakness is mainly due to the limited availability of data and should be properly addressed in future research.