The impact of local responsiveness on the process of internationalization

: the case of Jerónimo Martins in Colombia

Abstract

The case study under examination focuses on the internalization strategy held by a major Portuguese retail company that decided to expand its business to Colombia by starting a successful local supermarket chain named "Ara". The objective of the research is to provide an important insight regarding the relationship between the dilemma of standardization/adaptation, the Local Responsiveness (“LR”) impact and sustainability for the retail food industry. This dissertation endeavours to recognize the factors hidden LR as saw by administrators of Multinational Enterprises ("MNE") inside an element rising environment. This project purpose is to analyse three crucial areas that can definitely impact the success of such strategy: environment, structure and organization. The results that surfaced from this research attest the difficulty in understanding a given company’s international strategy, namely because although the internationalisation process can be easily assessed the underlying strategy suffers profound structural changes along the process. The final finding is that, to some extent, when the internationalization strategy considers LR as core goal, it supports sustainable growth and contributes to the success of the project. My goal is that the conclusions drawn from this study can make an important commitment to the current hypotheses with respect to the subject, and also helping organizations in characterizing and executing their internationalization methodologies.

Date of Award	18 Oct 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Laure Leglise (Supervisor)