A Study on the Internationalization of ASEAN Firms——Global or Regional?——

Abstract

Outward foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries has been growing. As a result, the internationalization of local firms is rapidly progressing in the ASEAN region. This paper identifies representative MNCs in ASEAN and classifies them into “global” and “regional” groups based on the geographic characteristics of their business locations, and analyzes the characteristics of each group by focusing on the global market size of the industry to which each firm belongs. As a result, it was found that the “global type” generally consists of small and medium-sized industries, while the “regional type,” on the contrary, mainly consists of large-sized industries. This phenomenon may be related to the fact that ASEAN firms are latecomers to internationalization and their management scale is generally smaller than that of BRICs firms, such as China and India, among firms based in emerging markets (countries).