The Impact of Industry Architectures and Supply Chains on Successful Expansion in Emerging Markets

Korean firms have been vigorously searching and exploring overseas market opportunities through export and overseas investment. As of end of 2019, there were more than 80,000 Korean overseas subsidiaries all over the world. With Korean overseas direct investment increasing recently, it became one of the important issues for overseas investors to be successful in the global market. There are a lot of studies on factors influencing the performance of overseas subsidiaries such as ‘firm’ and ‘country’ factors. This study empirically examines subsidiary performance determinants with ‘industry architectures’ by using a sample of 292 overseas Korean firm subsidiaries. Industry architectures are the stable but evolving sets of rules and roles through which labor is divided within a sector. This article considers how industry architectures shape success in international expansion. Industry architectures differ between countries, are not necessarily technologically determined, shape firms’ capabilities and their competitive environment, and constitute a distinct level of analysis. We extract antecedents of related theory and empirically test its impact with a survey of Korean firms expanding in emerging economies. We would say this is the first study which tries to focus on industry architectures with the performance of Korean overseas subsidiaries. We find that separability and similarity of industry architectures across countries and localization of subsidiaries are robust and important predictors of success in international expansion. Our results suggest that industry architectures should be added to firm and country as an intermediate level of analysis that helps explain success in international expansion. While we established a pattern, much more remains to be done. We focus on the success of foreign operations, but we do not consider the broader benefits of going abroad, such as the learning or network effects that accrue at the level of the entire firm. The next obvious question is whether the results would differ in the developed market context. These we leave for future research to consider.