Obtaining international results through partnerships: evidence from Russian MNEs in the IT sector

The paper discusses the internationalisation specifics and results of Russian MNEs in the IT sector. The strategies of these firms are focused more on the acquisition of customers than of technologies when expanding abroad. As the technological sophistication of Russian companies and foreign firms in the high-tech sector is about equal (if compared to natural resource-based enterprises), our findings indicate that partnership-oriented strategy provides Russian firms with a better chance of obtaining positive results when expanding abroad. IT companies from Russia are relatively less influenced by their home government, being shaped more by economic than political factors in their international expansion Hence, we argue that they seem to be more marketing-oriented in their international expansion than their natural resource-based counterparts.