Strategic Options for Internationalization in Korean Organizations

Globalization of economy brings both opportunities and threats especially for companies in developing countries such as Korea. Globalization is an opportunity because it may expand the size of market for the company where globalization brings a threat for developing global competitiveness. If the company has already built competitive advantage in its business domain, the company can easily transfer market growth to profit improvement. However, if the company has not developed competitive advantage, globalization of economy will give a serious threat for the survivor of the company. The company might lose its own domestic market share. For the less famous brand of product or company name, international expansion is a challenging strategy. The study evaluated organizational performance of companies that try international expansion by utilizing Miles and Snow's strategy typology. We clustered organizations based on their strategy typology (prospector, analyzer, defender, and reactor) in view of the level of product diversification, new product development instances, level of localization, and autonomy of foreign subsidiary. With the strategy typology, we evaluated international strategy in view of product competitiveness, marketing strategy, human resource strategy, and organizational strategy. The regression result demonstrates that the performance of the company is significantly higher when the company employs prospector strategy. We also found out that product quality and emphasis for developed countries in international expansion are the most important factors for success.