Your company can be the queen of the local market, have its finger on the pulse of consumers and know how to steer them towards innovative products that your team develops to remain a leader in a given region.
It can be very profitable and give you as an owner, director or manager a lot of satisfaction; enough to discard the idea of going across borders to fight much riskier battles.
You can leave the word "internationalization" out of the everyday dictionary because, after all, no one is packing their bags and everything is going well. WRONG, say the experts .
To begin with, the fact that you have even considered the possibility of going out to look for other markets or partners abroad is already a form of global thinking.
To continue, you don't have to go out and look for globalization in the world. Sooner or later it will arrive at your company's doors, or rather at the doors of your customers and suppliers, and it will want to take away a portion of the market you think you have so dominated.
And for even more reasons, it will always be positive to have a path to the outside world in sight, whether to grow the business, to diversify it or to eventually reduce risk margins.
"No one escapes the need to approach the business from a global perspective and we will always face international competition," says expert Nicolas Kfury, professor of the program Internationalization Strategiesprogram at INCAE Business School.
Kfury recommends delving into the various roadmaps for thinking globally and they offer four reasons for doing so, the professor points out:
- Market deregulation, which opens up the possibility of access to other markets through formats such as free trade agreements (FTAs). This makes local businesses more exposed. Take Mexico for example.
- Technological developments facilitate communications and execution of strategies for operating the company across borders, with business units or subsidiaries scattered around the world.
- The processes of economic integration by region open wide paths linked to the deregulation of markets.
- There is a homogenization of consumer preferences, with similar behavior patterns between distant countries, and some brands take advantage of this.
Beyond the polarized differences among theoreticians - on the one hand, those who consider that the planet is a single market and, on the other, those who believe that the local character of some products or services still predominates -, the unquestionable fact is the greater international exposure of companies and the need to have a strategy to take advantage of it or to discard it with sufficient arguments.
"The big challenge is to identify the right model for each company's objectives. There is no single way to stop globalization," adds Professor Kfury.
Thinking globally does not always mean that we should embark on a Marco Polo-style adventure, but we should be aware of the opportunities offered by an economy of scale, the probabilities of reducing risks by diversifying target audiences and also, of course, the existence of threats that have also become globalized and can nowadays be subject to rapid contagion.
That is why it is important to have answers to three very basic questions: Why do I want to internationalize, what kind of organization would I need, and how should this process be managed? The solutions are not in any manual. They depend on the line of business and, above all, the economic situation, but there are potential benefits.
The use of installed capacity, access to resources at lower prices and the learning curve with some elements that can be used on the cost side.
In terms of learning opportunities, there are also benefits from the stimulus to innovate, diversify and adapt products or services to other contexts.
And if we look at the network, there are also the eventual fruits of being able to participate in an international network, to approach cross-border customer bases and to capitalize on the value of a brand whose local success transcends to other countries and ends up being the spark of an expansion process.
