Some Aspects of Internationalization by Larger Indian Firms: Evidence from Ten Case Studies

The success of India’s recent economic reform programme hinges crucially, among other things, on the level of internationalization of Indian firms. However, in the global market, Indian products rank low on critical factors like quality, delivery, and technology. Indian firms face a daunting task because of a variety of handicaps; lack of state of the art technology, capital, international marketing expertise, access to distribution channels, and international perspective in strategy formulation and risk taking ability to explore international markets. Given this gloomy scenario it is heartening to note from case studies published in business journals the many faceted exploits of some larger Indian firms in international markets. Companies like Core Parenterals, Arvind Mills, Ranbaxy Laboratories, ITC, Hindustan Lever, Dabur, Lupin Laboratories, and some others have often been in the news. With the belief that an exploration of the characteristics of large Indian firms which are focusing on internationalization as a significant asect of their overall strategies we undertook a content analysis of enterprise case studies published in business journals. This paper identifies the key characteristics of selected firms’ internationalization efforts and presents an explanatory conceptual framework.