International outsourcing in Swedish companies : How to keep key competencies in Swedish firms?

This thesis is mainly based on an extensive literature review and statistic analysis. The purpose is to find out the motives and effects of four different options in both literature and empirical study and then answer research questions. The four options are in house production, off-shoring, domestic outsourcing and international outsourcing. After the explanation of four options’ definitions, literature review will discuss most common motives and effects of outsourcing from many articles. The theory basis, such as transaction cost, resource based view, industrial view and their influence on the outsourcing will be mentioned to help reader to understand outsourcing. In empirical study, four options model and two questions (in house/outsourcing, domestic/off-shoring) from survey are used to classify Swedish companies into four groups which stand for four options. The statistics analysis results are from SPSS's ANOVA and Scheffe. According to the results, important motives of Swedish companies are “cost reduction”, “investment reduction”, “fixed cost”, and “accessing to core competence”. They are a little different from the literature review. And most effects of four options are positive, only “lead time” and “delivery time” is significant between “in house production” and “off-shoring” options