From the Import-Substituting Industrialization to Internationalization in the Machine Tools Industry in Brazil: The Case of Romi

This paper aims to describe Romi’s business history in order to contribute to the discussion and improve the understanding of how Brazil, with strong industrial growth during the import substitution process, but with low technological development, generated companies that exported technology-intensive capital goods, and also started these firms’ internationalization process. Romi started out as a small business, an automobile repair shop, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the company was already one of the largest lathe producers in the world. Today, it is still an important machine tools producer in Brazil with subsidiaries in several countries around the world