Emerging market multinational companies’ evolutionary paths to building a competitive advantage from emerging markets to developed countries

One significant emerging phenomenon of global competition is the increasing number of Emerging Market Multinational Companies (EMNCs) that have survived and succeeded in the constraining institutional environments in their home turfs and are now participating in the global marketplace. However, despite the growing literature, our understanding of the factors that influence EMNCs’ competitive advantage is limited. We conduct a historical longitudinal analysis of sixteen companies originating from key emerging markets viz. India and China. Our findings suggest that EMNCs’ evolutionary paths to building competitive advantage from their home market to the developed countries is, on one-hand, based on the EMNCs’ ability to acquire resources and absorb them to build their own advantage. On the other hand, it is also based on EMNCs’ ability to find new market niches and to enhance their innovation capabilities to overcome the liability of emergingness.