Insights Into The Universe Of World-Class Multinational Enterprises: A Cross-Sectoral Focus

As the business environment has undergone profound changes over the past decades, international expansion has become a strategic imperative for companies seeking to ensure sustainable competitive advantage. This paper aims to explore patterns of sectoral coverage and expansion of the most cross-border oriented companies globally, listed by UNCTAD in the Top 100 MNEs operating in non-financial sectors, according to their technological profile. In the first phase, we employed a descriptive analysis to reveal some stylized facts from the comparative analysis of indicators capturing the intensity of operations conducted abroad by the companies listed in the selected samples in 1990 and 2021. Subsequently, we developed a three-dimensional model that integrates three of the indicators developed by UNCTAD, namely the share of foreign assets in total assets, the share of foreign sales in total sales and the transnationality index; this model groups the top companies into four categories of players. The results in 2021 compared to 1990 suggest an increase in foreign operations and a more notable presence of companies in the high-tech and medium-tech sectors, not only in the overall top, but also in the class of leading players. The results, despite the inherent limitations of the study, have both theoretical and managerial implications.