A Strategic Risk Management Framework for Multinational Enterprise

Liberalizations of international trade and improvements in communication and information technologies allow companies to organize around extensive multinational structures of cross-border sourcing networks. In a freely interacting market setting multinational enterprise is exposed to financial and economic risks that can be monitored within conventional reporting systems and managed through use of various derivative instruments. All the while, a dispersed multinational structure can be vulnerable to disruptions caused by changing economic conditions, competitive moves, and geopolitical developments as well as natural disasters and terrorist events that are difficult to forecast. Consequently, current risk management techniques span from conventional gap analyses and quantitative value-at-risk measures of market-related exposures to more qualitative assessments of competitive exposures and low-frequency high-impact disaster events based on scenario analyses. Hence, there is a need to consider risk management approaches that integrate relatively transparent financial exposures with the consequences of uncertain and hard-to-quantify event risks. This paper outlines the contours of such a strategic risk management framework incorporating conventional exposure measures and simulation techniques to assess vulnerability and responsiveness in a turbulent global setting.