Value Creation of Internationalization Strategies of Italian Medium-Sized Listed Firms

In the last 40 years, the intensity of the internationalization process of Italian firms has been growing. Unlike other developed countries, for which studies on internationalization are mostly related to large multinational corporations, the majority of Italian studies rely on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) (Depperu, 1997; Zucchella and Maccarini, 1999), which are considered to be distinctive of the Italian entrepreneurial base. Italian SMEs are used to going abroad through either non-equity or low-equity entry modes, such as exporting and joint ventures, because of their low confidence in international M&As. The propensity of Italian firms to go international through high-equity entry modes is more recent, and has grown in the last few years. Between 2002 and 2007, the Italian outward Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) increased by 3.6 per cent if we look at the average growth rate of foreign shareholdings and 5.8 per cent if we look at the number of subsidiaries (ICE, 2009, p. 290). It is worth noticing that medium-sized enterprises contributed the most to the above growth, despite their relatively low incidence on the total FDI stock (Mariotti and Mutinelli, 2009). These data lead us to argue that internationalization strategies of SMEs are likely to be remarkably different depending on the specific size of constituent firms (e.g. micro, small and medium firms).