Research On The Relationship Between The Degree Of Internationalization And Performance Of Telecom Firms

Under the impetus of economic globalization, "corporate internationalization" has become a common concern of both senior managers and scholars. The most concerned topics included the motives of internationalization, the conditions of internationalization and the entry mode of internationalization. As for the aim of internationalization, a number of literature and empirical researches were done on the relationship between the degree of internationalization and the corporate performance, but no unanimous conclusion has been reached yet. Most foreign scholars focused on the manufacturing firms or cross-industry firms of a certain country, seldom on the telecommunication firms from different countries, while domestic researchers were more concentrated on the theory or case studies and did few in-depth empirical researches. Therefore, this paper did a research on the relationship between the degree of internationalization and corporate performance of global telecommunication firms, considering the influences of the conditions of internationalization on this relationship.On the basis of literature studies, this paper constructed a logic model of the degree of internationalization, the conditions of internationalization, the entry mode of internationalization and corporate performance, and raised four groups of five hypotheses. The paper collected 81 samples of 27 global listed telecom operators' financial data from 2005 to 2007, and did multiple regression-based empirical researches with SPSS in order to test the above hypothesis. In addition, this paper selected two typical internationalized carriers from the European region and Asia-Pacific region respectively to do case studies. Time-series curve estimates of the degree of internationalization and their corporate performances were did firstly, following by analysis of their firm-specific advantages and entry mode of internationalization.Based on the above studies, the paper made two conclusions: first, the degree of internationalization has significant influence on the corporate performance with the shape of "S"; second, cost would grow with the accumulating of firm-specific advantages, the firms should adjust its research and development expenses and customer retaining expenses as the change of demand for firm-specific advantages in different stages of internationalization.There are several innovative points in this paper: First, it filled the international academic blank of empirical researches on the relationship between the degree of internationalization and corporate performance of global telecom industry. Second, it made up for the domestic lack of researches on the impact of internationalization on corporate performance, combining empirical researches and case studies. Third, it enriched the study on the relationship between the degree of internationalization and corporate performance in a perspective of the firm-specific advantages.