International market selection

: the case of portuguese companies in Poland

Abstract

There are 108 Portuguese companies in Poland, what makes this Central European country the 5th destiny of Portuguese foreign direct investment. How these companies selected this particular foreign market? The present work seeks to identify the factors that underlie the decision of Portuguese companies while choosing an international market to enter. The empirical basis for this investigation is provided by two in-depth case studies, concerning two Portuguese companies which internationalized to Poland: Mota-Engil SGPS, S.A and ControlVet SGPS, S.A. An extensive literature review about International Market Selection (IMS) has been conducted and, in order to enrich the methodology chosen, additional information sources, such as governmental agencies reports, newspaper reports, firms’ brochures and annual reports were also used. The polish market selection by Mota-Engil and ControlVet suggests that there are two different reasons that made Portuguese companies to choose polish market for their international operations: 1) Poland was selected because of market characteristics and 2) selection of polish market was a firm response to unexpected opportunity. Despite the fact that the IMS process is quite broadly described in the existing literature, this study is the only one that approaches IMS from a perspective of one specific foreign investment destination country as well as one specific investors group. Thus, the findings provide an interesting insight not only for Portuguese companies wishing to expand their operations into international markets, but also for the foreign country governmental or trade institutions, providing them with a set of factors that influence the foreign investment flow into the market. Naturally, the use of case study methodology has its shortcomings, especially in terms of sample size. As such, the findings of this study must be further verified and extended by other cases.

Date of Award	20 Aug 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Susana Silva (Supervisor)