A Cross-Country Case Study : Comparison of the Internationalization Processes Between Swedish and Chinese Small and Medium Enterprises

Sammanfattning: Due to the globalization trend, the internationalization of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has become a common practice in the last decades. The previous literature suggested that there are many different determinants of the internationalization process. However, in this research study, we focused on only three determinants – institutions, networks, and entrepreneur and their influence on the internationalization process. More specifically, we identified the significance of the three determinants and tested their influence on the internationalization process and compared the similarities and differences between the SMEs in Sweden and China. A qualitative study was carried out to help determine the purpose of the paper, where data was collected through four case studies – two from each country, within the toy industry. The primary data was collected through personal phone-interviews with the CEOs of the four toy companies, complemented with secondary data collected from the companies’ web sites. The empirical findings and analysis brought some interesting conclusions. The three determinants – institutions, networks and entrepreneur influence the internationalization process in one way or another. Firstly, institutions influence both networks and entrepreneur, but there is no evidence showing that networks and entrepreneur influence institutions. The institutions are also the key determinants of the internationalization process of Chinese SMEs. Secondly, networks and entrepreneur are interrelated to each other and play a key role in the internationalization process of Swedish SMEs, and somewhat influence the Chinese SMEs as well. Thus, these three determinants are extremely important for the internationalization process and they have to be taken into consideration during the international expansion.