Digital Orientation for Emerging Multinationals and the Location Strategies in Internationalization: The Chinese Experience

Abstract

Purpose- Despite the ongoing digital transformation, it is not clear whether emerging market firms follow their manufacturing FDI path in the emerging digital industries. This paper examines how digital orientation affects the location strategies in internationalization and how the existing innovation capacities moderate the link between digital orientation and the location strategies.
 Design/methodology/approach- This study chooses the Chinese setting for research design because digital transformation is already prevalent in the society and the cases of outward expansion are salient among the emerging markets. It uses the panel dataset of 976 Chinese listed firms that consists of 6,648 observations spanning from 2007 to 2017. Ordinary least square regression is used for the statistical approach with a one-year lag in the model.
 Findings- Digital orientation increases a likelihood of emerging multinationals’ entries in developed countries, and a high level of innovative capacities strengthens the link. Two groups seem to prefer entries in developed countries: firms with a high level of digital orientation with a high level of innovative capacities and firms with a low level of digital orientation, if with a low level of innovative capacities. The former reflects the context of digital transformation and the latter hints at the tax avoidance or interests in real estate.
 Research implications or originality -While emerging multinationals are known to prefer entries in developing countries for capacity arbitrage, our results forecast that their FDI strategies may have a drastic change as digital transformation deepens.