Internationalization paths of fruit export companies from emerging economies: Are they regionally or globally oriented?

There is a continuing debate regarding firms internationalization pathways and the approaches used for firm categorization, resulting in controversial identification of the degree of firms globalization. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework to examine the changes in the internationalization strategies of agricultural export companies from emerging economies over time. Thereby seeking to identify conceptual and empirical differences in what is known of export firms acting in non-agricultural sectors in industrialized countries. The matrix of multi-nationality developed by Aggarwal et al. (2011) is extended and tested to classify 233 Chilean fresh fruit exporters according to their internationalization strategies. A longitudinal analysis is conducted over a seven-year period (2009-2015) to explore the dynamics on that internationalization process. Most firms are transregionally (65.12%) and globally oriented (16.06%), mainly following a linear internationalization path in terms of number of markets but acting more as born-global firms in terms of psychic distance. This study provides a more inclusive and nuanced framework than those used in previous studies to classify the level of firms internationalization. It also contributes to existing literature by studying companies from the agricultural sector in Chile longitudinally, as a prime example of emerging economies from Latin America. Acknowledgement : The authors acknowledge the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the University of Costa Rica on doing this research