Issue 4, 2013

Panibratov A. Yu., Sergeeva A. A. Foundations of International Competitiveness of Russian MNEs in the IT Sector .

The phenomenon of multinational enterprises from emerging economies (EMNEs) has come increasingly to the focus of international business research during the last decades. The rising international involvement and global competitiveness of these firms contradict to the assumption of the established theory of internationalization, which considers them as not possessing capabilities for successful global expansion and hence being doomed to stay the international production shop floor. To over come this gap between theory and empirical evidence, we need to understand the origin of EMNEs’ competitive advantages, explain the specifics of these firms’ motives for international expansion, and answer why they choose particular strategies when going abroad. That large-scale task is hardly achievable within one single study. In this article, we contribute in the development of the knowledge of EMNEs internationalization using the case of the Russian high-tech firms. We answer how Russian IT companies explore their strategic resources with the aim to achieve the sustainable competitive advantage while going abroad. In this paper, we conclude that advantages of Russian IT firms a based primarily on their ability to create the hi-end complex products and provide the related services. Besides, the pro-activity and global vision of these firms’ managers allow them to compete with their western counterparts. The basic sources of these advantages are prominent individual capabilities of technicians, who were raised by soviet educational system, and low sophistication of the domestic demand for IT product. We see our results, based on the analysis of the data on Russian IT companies, significantly contributing in the understanding of the origins of the competitiveness of emerging economies’ MNEs. Keywords: internationalization, competitiveness of emerging MNEs, Russian IT companies.

<< Contents: Issue 4, 2013
<< Go to archive