General Management Department's Lecture

Theme：Springboard internationalization by emerging market firms: speed of first cross-border acquisition

Speaker：Vikas Kumar（The University of Sydney）

Time：2019-09-18 09:00

Address：Room 712, Mingde Business Building

Language：English

ABSTRACT：
According to the springboard perspective, emerging market multinationals seek strategic assets aggressively from the outset. In this paper, we investigate the role of firms’ institutional embeddedness in terms of age and affiliation to business group on their aggressive internationalization pursuits, an issue which has remained less explored in international business scholarship. This study, based on 8163 Indian listed firms over 18 years, identifies a trend that younger firms founded in the liberalized era, post1991, and unaffiliated firms are more likely to pursue aggressive internationalization by conducting their first cross-border acquisition (CBA) faster. Among affiliated firms, younger ones are relatively faster in conducting their first CBA. Furthermore, the evidence signals a moderating impact of inter-group heterogeneity in terms of group-level assets and foreign investments on the relationship between firm age and aggressive internationalization.

Professor Kumar will also talk about the potential for scholars in emerging markets to utilize ‘context’ to craft their research papers and make a contribution to the advancement of IB/Strategy research. He would like to also briefly talk about Journal of International Management, of which he is going to be Editor-in-Chief from Jan 2020.

SHORT BIO：
Vikas Kumar is Head of Discipline (Department) and Professor in the Discipline of International Business at the University of Sydney Business School. He has a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University, USA. He was previously at Bocconi University and is a Dunning Fellow. Vikas is interested in studying the internationalization strategies employed by firms from emerging markets such as India. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Asia Business Studies, Senior Editor of Asia Pacific Journal of Management. He will be taking over as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of International Management in January 2020.