Temporal and Spatial Constructs in Service Firms' Internationalization Patterns: The Determinants of the Accelerated Growth of Emerging MNEs

Abstract

The recent years have witnessed an unprecedented surge of Emerging Multinational Enterprises (EMNEs), i.e. firms from the emerging economies that have started internationalization very late and have expanded abroad in a rather accelerated fashion. In particular, pace and international diversification emerge as distinctive features of service EMNEs' successful internationalization patterns, inducing scholars to question the applicability of traditional internationalization theories to EMNEs. The Linkage–Leverage–Learning (LLL) Model and the springboard perspective identified some of the critical EMNEs uniqueness and investigated potential antecedents of their abnormal patterns. Nevertheless, previous contributions neglected to provide a solid empirical base for measuring spatio-temporal dimensions of EMNEs' internationalization. This paper aims to empirically investigate the dimensions affecting the pace at which EMNEs enlarge their geographic scope, by performing OLS regression analysis. The main outcomes demonstrate the crucial role of cumulative benefits from inward internationalization and inter-regional diversification strategies in boosting EMNEs' overseas expansion, in opposition to traditional MNEs (TMNEs). The results corroborate some assumptions of emerging theories on EMNEs, and provide insight for extending traditional MNEs theories by rethinking concepts, relations and causalities.