Non-US: International Business Analysis

International Strategy

Currently majority of the consultancy customers are in the U.S., as non-U.S. small businesses are reluctant to pay for the travel cost. For the 5% of customers who are outside of the U.S., they pay subscriptions to use the software and utilize the self-help knowledge base on the product website.

After gaining experience in the U.S. market, and seeing healthy revenue growth yearly for 3 years, the company is ready to expand into the global market. The company plans to enter the international market in two phases. First, finding a partner in a different geographical region to cooperate in order to increase market share and to reduce operating cost through sharing of competencies and resources. Second, with the same partner,

Cooperative strategy allows a firm to combine resources and capabilities with another firm to create a new competitive advantage, one which the firm could not create with the other, such as to co-develop, sell and service goods or services. It takes the form of strategic alliances, which can be a joint venture, legally independent company, equity strategy alliance, or non-equity strategic alliances (Hitt, Ireland, & Hoshisson, 2015). In a fast cycle, firms use it to move between competitive advantages to speed up new product development, new market development, or to form an industry technology standard and overcome uncertainty (Hitt, Ireland, & Hoshisson, 2015).

The partner company of choice is a software company based in the UK which specializes in Business Process Management software and consultancy. The two companies have similar business model and organizational structure. Both provide software products that are available on the cloud and both provide value-added consultancy to help organization improve their business

By cooperating, both companies share cost in various parts of the value chain. A business adds value to its products or services through a series of activities it performs within the company. First, the primary value activities describe the production, the selling, and after-sales support for its products and services. Second, the support value activities describe all business functions needed to provide the human resource, the technology, the infrastructure, and the supplies (Baltzan, 2012). Whitaker, Ekman, and Thompson (2017) conducted a case study across four large multinational corporations (MNCs) found that IT for manufacturing durable goods focuses on value chain reconfiguration with greater focus on using IT to coordinate ack-office processes than front-office processes while MNCs with individual consumers focuses more on IT to achieve local