Introduction: The Diversity of Internationalization Strategies and Trajectories of Automobile Sector Firms

For most observers, the globalization of firms is under way and irreversible. In accordance with their descriptive and analytical orientation, GERPISA contributors to this book question this common affirmation, describing the internationalization trajectories of automobile sector companies: builders, suppliers and distributors over forty years. They show the diversity of ways and forms of internationalization, the reversibility of these processes observed in the past, the restrictive conditions of profitability in overseas operations, and the prevalence of regionalization in spite of globalization attempts since the early 1990s. For this reason, the automobile firms’ trajectories are grouped and analysed by their region of origin. This book considers North America and Asia. A companion book deals with the European automobile industry (Freyssenet et al., 2002). In the conclusion we propose to consider the diversity of the forms of internationalization, their successes and their failures, examining differences in the companies’ profit strategies and the variable relevance of these strategies according to the evolutionary regional context. To facilitate the understanding of the rest of the book, we explain in this introduction the different forms of internationalization observed in the automobile industry since its beginning.