The Internationalisation of Emerging Market Firms: A Study of the Indian Service Sector

This study investigates the motives for and favoured investment modes of internationalisation of Indian services sector firms. Further, this study examines capabilities and resources and how companies deploy these in international markets. This entails understanding how the companies adapt to host markets and the mechanisms which trigger dynamic capability adoption. Finally, this study analyses the effects of the external market on their internationalisation motives. This study’s relevance is significant given increasing investments from emerging and transition economies, which form a third of global investments today compared to less than ten percent two decades ago. This coupled with the notion that emerging market companies lack the pre-existing capabilities required for internationalisation, is probed in this study. Internationalisation theories have been sourced from a western context based on developed market companies’ investment into other developed or emerging market countries; in this context, this study provides evidence of a subaltern view in reference to the internationalisation of emerging market firms.

The empirical material consists of five Indian service sector firms with significant international presence in the Information Technology, Telecom and Hospitality service sectors. The research adopts an interpretivist cum constructivist approach to understanding their internationalisation motives using a qualitative exploratory case-study based research method. Data was collected in the form of semi-structured interviews (elite interviews) with the decision makers of the companies under study. This was supplemented with email questionnaires from former employees who had worked in overseas locations. This was further supplemented with secondary data towards reliability and triangulation purposes.

Findings from this thesis illustrate that the firms studied are heterogeneous in nature about their internationalisation motives. There is divergence in managerial learning across host markets in the adaption of internationalisation for the creation of competitive advantage. In analysing the internationalisation motives of these companies, this study extends the existing theoretical understanding behind the concept of multinational companies. This study also makes a theoretical contribution towards the understanding of fast capability acquisition by Indian service sector firms towards rapid internationalisation while developing a competitive advantage in foreign host markets.