A Perspective on Regional and Global Strategies of Multinational Enterprises

It is widely accepted that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are the key drivers of globalization. The ultimate test to assess the level of globalization is the actual penetration of markets across the globe, especially in the broad ‘triad’ markets of NAFTA, the European Union and Asia. Yet, data on the activities of the 500 largest MNEs reveal that very few actually operate globally. For 320 of the 380 for which geographic sales data are available, an average of 80.3% of their total sales are in their home region of the triad. This means that the world’s largest firms are not global, but regionally based in terms of breadth and depth of market coverage. Globalization thus reflects a special, and rather unusual, outcome of doing international business, and regional strategies are more relevant than global ones. This has important implications for various strands of mainstream international business research, as well as for the broader managerial debate on the design of optimal strategies and governance structures for MNEs.