Emerging Market Multinationals: the New Model of Internationalization of Firms

The conventional global competitive landscape started to change since the 1990s with the emergence of emerging market multinationals (EMNEs). Most of EMNEs were marginal competitors just a decade ago, but, today, they are challenging the world’s most accomplished and establishedmultinational enterprises (MNEs)from advanced markets in a wide variety of industries and markets. EMNEs have adopted different global expansion strategies from advanced market MNEs in the process of internationalization. Therefore, it is timely and critical to question whether the existing theories on internationalization of MNEs that have been developed mainly studying MNEs from advanced markets are relevant to explain the behaviors and strategies of EMNEs. Through this paper, I try to elaborate the behaviors and strategies that have been adopted by EMNEs in their internationalization process to support the theory building efforts to explain the internationalization of EMNEs. Although we need to elaborate new theories to explain internationalization process specifically appropriate to EMNEs, we also need to identify which aspects of the existing theories on internationalization of MNEs are universally vali