An Empirical Study On The Influencing Factors To The Internationalization Of Chinese Private-owned Firms

Economy globalization has witness the changes of economic running mechanism and development mode in the world economy. Firm internationalization is one main aspect of the economy globalization in micro-level. People have realized that state competivity and industry competivity finally incarnate firm competivity, while internationalization is the important approach to abtain competivity for firm, industry and state. Therefore firm internationalization is the research hotspot in academe.In fronted of the situation that China has been one part of the global economy, great many Chinese private-owned firms devote themselves to the tide of economy globalization actively. Because of the clear property right and flexible machanism, private-owned firms in littoral, such as Zhejiang province, Guangdong province, Jiangsu province, attach themselves to the international competition.After hackling the evolution course of research on the influence factors of firm internationalization, this paper assess the main theoretical propositions of the theory in existence, based on the following completely new six aspects: external conditions for early internationalization, entrepreneurial cognition of international business opportunities, resource requirement when internationalization is initiated, psychic distance and selection of foreign markets and entry modes, competitive strategies of firms, and the relationship between the timing of internationalization and firm performance. Then we choose 16 firms to carry out in-depth case studies, following which, we construct regression model according to theory proposition, carry out the metric analysis based on the questionare.Based on the research, the argument of bounded entrepreneurship is incorporated into a more flexible framework of entrepreneurship to explain unique internationalisation patterns and competitive positions of these indigenous Chinese private-owned firms.Embedded in a transitional and emerging country, indigenous Chinese entrepreneurs are bounded by their low education and experience and by unfavourable institutional arrangements. They had limited technological, managerial and lingual knowledge. Thus, (1) they have limited rationality in assessing the degree of integration and homogeneity of the domestic and foreign markets; and (2) they have bounded entrepreneurial cognition of international business opportunities and hence tended to start their businesses at the home market. However, (3) given the lack of business networks and experiential knowledge about foreign markets and operations, they either "waited for windfall" or strove to obtain the information by other means such as attending exhibitions. (4) Given the bounded entrepreneurship, some of them carried out inward-oriented internationalisation activities to learn technological and managerial knowledge before they started outward-oriented activities. (5) Given the bounded technological knowledge, they pursed a combined strategy of differentiation and cost leadership. (6) Finally, the timing of internationalization alone may not be sufficient to firm performance as the latter may be influenced by many other factors.According to the results of the empirical study, the last part of this paper gives the suggestions of improving the entrepreneurship and promoting internationalization performance: (1) attach importance to the regular education and practice training; (2) accumulate the internationalization experience; (3) develop internalization voluntary and pay attention to the selection of international strategy; (4)pay attention to the importance of civilization environment, strike up the civilization environment which can improve the entrepreneurship in the firm inside and the whole China.