The Internet and SMEs’ Internationalization : cases studies of Swedish manufacturing SMEs

For many years, the internationalization of the markets, caused by the convergence of the tastes across borders, was thought to result in very large multinational enterprises. But, with the development of the world economy, especially the commercial use of the Internet, today’s international market is creating more and more opportunities and competitive challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs. The Internet, argued by lots of scholars, presents a fundamentally different environment for SMEs to explore the global market. The purpose of this study is to explore manufacturing SMEs’ experience of integrating Internet to their internationalization. It is done by the comparison of existing literature and the sample Swedish SMEs. The findings show that, in these companies, the Internet is only a cheap and fast tool to search information and to do communication when going internationalization. None of them has integrated the Internet into its business strategies or business models, which is argued the best way for SMEs to take advantage from the Internet. For manufacturing SMEs, especially for the SMEs who produce high technological, specialized products, the traditional way of person-to-person business model and the gradual penetration pattern is still the dominant method to do international business.Validerat; 20101217 (root