International marketing : a study of relational processes, firm competencies and export performance in China
Abstract
A huge country such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) presents both great opportunities and sizable challenges to international business people. In the first section of this paper, an overview of the market environment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is presented. Key indicators on the demographic, economic, and socio-cultural environment of China are reported and followed by some implications on the future directions of change. In the second section of this paper, an empirical study investigating influence of relational processes and firm competencies on export performance of firms based in China is reported. The existent export performance literature offered very limited guidelines over management of exporter-importer relationship in that a) little work has examined the simultaneous use of firm-specific competency factors and inter-firm relationship factors to structure exchange relationships; and b) no work today considers the time-dependent nature of resource factors and relationship factors on critical performance outcomes. To fill these voids, this study made use of the systematic classification of relationship life cycle to examine 389 export ventures that fall into four relational phrases: exploration, buildup, maturity, and decline phases. The current findings suggested that export competencies and exporter-importer collaborations positively affect export performance. Along with these main effects, the contrast in results from the total sample to the phrase-by-phrase analysis underscores the powerful effect of the relationship context in determining export performance and highlights the need for tailoring interorganizational governances according to relational phase.