The Internationalisation of the Large Brazilian Pharmaceutical Companies: Challenges, Competitive Advantages and Strategies

This paper aims to analyse the characteristics of the Large Brazilian Pharmaceutical Companies’ internationalisation. Internationalisation can be used as a strategy to overcome the challenges the companies are facing in the domestic market and an opportunity to catch up. We carried out a multiple case study with eight companies to identify their competitive advantages and strategies of going abroad. The results show the typical characteristics of companies and two distinct patterns: the exploration and the exploitation of assets and capabilities in the international market. The conclusions bring contributions to the International Business of emerging countries and evolutionary literature: i) the competitive advantages of companies are built before internationalisation concerning financial capacity and adaptation to the home institutional environment; ii) the companies follow strategies of technological catch-up in developed countries as a shortcut to overcome their innovative weaknesses; iii) the main obstacles to internationalisation refer to the vulnerability of the institutional, political, and regulatory domestic environment