The Internationalization of American and Asian Automobile Firms : A Statistical Comparison with the European Companies

Internationalization increases firms’ vulnerability to cyclical fluctuations in growth. For this reason, it is at best a positive strategy for a few firms; but certainly not for all. It is from this perspective that the present chapter will try to develop a quantitative analysis of the internationalization of firms.We shall be attempting to answer two fundamental questions:1. What are firms’ current levels of internationalization? Is there really such a thing as a ‘global’ firm?2. How do international activities contribute to firms’ profits (or losses)?The present chapter is organized in the following manner: the first section is an inventory presenting the level of concentration that characterizes the world’s automobile industry. The second section measures the extent of firms’ commercial internationalization, and subsequently their level of productive and financial internationalization. We conclude this section with a presentation of two synthetical indexes. The third section focuses on the contributions that overseas activities make to firms’ world-wide profits (or losses). In particular, we shall look at American, Japanese and French firms