Expanding business to Latin America : internationalization plan for a Born-Again Global company

Abstract

This thesis is done to support and guide a Spanish based company to find the best market for the business expansion plan on area of business related to the paper industry. For this, the aim is to find a target country in Latin America. The selection of the target market, is based on a pre-study of the market. If the pre-study of the market is not properly done it can bring unexpected problems and unnecessary costs to the company. However, many of these problems can be foreseen by profound market research on the sector of products or services related to the companies’ trade.

The methods applied in analysis are not commonly used on financial area. One example is the principal component analysis, which, in this study, is used to reduce the big data in order to analyse the result easier. Matlab is a common tool in the researches related to the area of engineering, but in this research, it is used to execute the Principal component analysis as a part of financial study. The differences between the countries´ paper demand, production and importation volumes of the market is studied, by calculating the Apparent National Consumption per capita on different paper sections and analysing it´s development and standard deviation. Apart from this other macro-economic, population, country access and easy doing business related factors are studied. The result, the target country, is obtained by using the Principal Component Analysis and the Apparent National Consumption result. When the target country is clear the Internationalization strategy is planned based on the guidelines of Uffe Bundgaard-Jorgensen.

Internationalization strategy is important support and guide for a company that wants to expand business. Fast internationalization of companies has been popular topic in the last decades. This has been because many new companies have started their business on the global market instead of founding the business first on domestic market. This phenomenon is called Born Global. The traditional companies that have not started on the global markets; what opportunities do they have for the fast internationalization? The Born-Again Global are companies that internationalize fast after having had strong position on domestic market for many years. To achieve this a company needs an internationalization plan, including a profound market research on the sector of products or services they are trading.