Decisive Factors in Company Financial Internationalization : An Empirical Study

This paper seeks to identify factors potentially conditioning firms' financial internationalization. Companies often internationalize their financial areas as part of their larger internationalization strategy. In other words, such initiative is associated with the internationalization of non-financial business areas such as supplies, production or commercialization. However, the move to financial internationalization may also obey a specific strategy designed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by increasingly global financial milieus and markets. In this latter case, certain business characteristics such as size or the specific sector the company works in may condition this decision. Then again, of course, it may respond to a combination of the two, in which case all the factors mentioned are likely to exercise some influence. To test these propositions, we analyzed a sample of 461 firms located in the Basque Country (Northern Spain), using, among others, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests and logit analysis. In general, the results provide support for both motives for financial internationalization