Entry and Growth Strategies for Emerging Economies

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are expanding their global reach, carrying their products and brands to ever more remote corners of the world. They encounter business environments that vary not only from their country of origin, but also vary greatly amongst each other. Thus foreign investors have to adapt their strategies, most notably their marketing and acquisition strategies, to the local context. In this paper, we outline why globalisation drives MNEs into emerging economies, and we provide conceptual frameworks that may aid investors to adapt their strategies to emerging economy contexts. MNEs have to develop a portfolio of local and/or global brands that matches their competences with local needs. If they aim for market leadership they may pursue a multi-tier strategy, but this needs to be supported by an appropriate foundation of global and local resources. This strategy in particular requires the acquisition of complementary local resources controlled by local firms. However, acquisitions in emerging economies are inhibited by institutional obstacles and weak local firms. Thus, foreign investors may pursue staged, multiple, indirect, or Brownfield acquisitions to build their projected operation. We illustrate our proposed strategies by analysing how one multination enterprise - Carlsberg Breweries - has developed its operations in three very different emerging economies: Poland, Lithuania and Vietnam.