Determinants of Success and Failure in the Internationalization of the Cork Business: A Tale of Two Iberian Family Firms

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the facilitating and restricting factors during the internationalisation path of family firms, considering their competitive advantages, ownership structure, management attitudes and other intangible assets, as well as external factors to the firms, like location. The research involved a long run analysis (of more than one century) of two cork producing firms operating in Spain and Portugal: Mundet & C.ª, Lda and Corticeira Amorim. One of these companies—Mundet—was closed down in the 1980s and the other—Corticeira Amorim—became, and still is, the leading firm worldwide in the cork industry. A detailed comparison of these two histories—one of failure, the other of success—allows an accurate identification of the determinants of successful internationalisation. This comparison is useful for understanding several characteristics of both firms and testing several hypotheses within the context of the theoretical approach to the internationalisation of family firms, as well as the location choices they made, which were an important cause of the opposing destinies of these two emblematic Iberian cork family firms.