Strategie globali e redditività delle nuove imprese internazionali: un’analisi empirica

[Autom. eng. transl.] Since the 1990s, researchers' interest in the study of 'international new ventures' [Oviatt and McDougall, 1994], also called' born-global '[Knight and Cavusgil, 1996],' global startups' [Oviatt and McDougall, 1995] or 'early internationalizing firms' [Rialp et al., 2005], ie companies active in international markets since the time immediately following their establishment. The focus of the study is on the heterogeneity of new international companies in terms of 'global' versus 'regional' strategic orientation. In the last decade, in fact, numerous studies have tried to answer the question of whether and to what extent globalization has actually led multinational companies to a greater geographical dispersion of business activities. In particular, the expression 'regional strategies', referring to the Anglo-Saxon concept of 'region', refers to companies that operate mainly in countries within their own continent (for example, an Italian company whose export activity is in large extent in European markets). With the term 'global' strategies we refer, instead, to companies for which even very distant markets, in continents other than those of origin, generate a significant part of the company turnover. The present work is therefore located at the intersection of the research on the 'global' or 'regional' character of corporate strategies [Rugman and Verbeke, 2004] and the studies on new international companies, with the aim of analyzing whether a greater global orientation influences profitability. The main results of the study can be summarized as follows: a) new Italian international companies rarely achieve a broad penetration of foreign markets. They operate on a predominantly European basis. Therefore, the very expression of a 'global born' (born global) company can be misleading, since in most cases these companies are not 'global', but 'regional'. b) However, where companies are able to achieve a wide geographical dispersion of sales at a global level and, therefore, to overcome the liability of foreignness at an inter-regional level, performance improves significantly. In fact, global or born global companies show a higher profitability than both born regional and home country oriented companies. The analysis shows that the differences between companies in terms of global or regional strategic orientation are relevant for the purposes of company profitability.