Deepening the timing dimension of emerging market multinational companies’ internationalization – An exploratory perspective

Building from the nascent debate pertaining to the internationalization trajectories followed by EMNCs, this article proposes to better understand behaviors of multinational companies from emerging markets (EMNCs). A database containing the complete internationalization trajectory of 110 firms was created to analyze sequence patterns. Optimal matching technique helped us to build a taxonomy of seven distinct sequence patterns (serial acquirers, late acquirers, sequential acquirers, contractual internationalizers, collaborative internationalizers, opportunistic internationalizers, wholly owned internationalizers). Our findings partially confirm previous works pertaining to the internationalization process of EMNCs and shed a light on atypical behaviors which have not been studied yet. These findings allow us to obtain new insights, deepening our understanding of theories depicting how EMNCs behave such as springboard theory and the Linkage Leverage Learning framework. We also provide recommendations to MNC managers and for public policy.