Rene van der Bruggen, ‘Mister Imtech’, could be considered as a shopaholic. In the last ten years Imtech has bought about 100 other companies, each time not changing the management team and then leaving it to their own devices. The vision of Van der Bruggen was that Imtech a decentralized organisation did not need to consider ‘strong cultural differences’. Trusting the management of the daughter companies blindly, the lack of attention and complete mismanagement and fraud in Germany led to the biggest bankruptcy in Dutch History.
When a company mergers over the border it looks at the global corporate strategies. There are four different strategies each one with its own pros and cons. One of those strategies is the Globalization strategy. In this strategy an organization assumes that a single global market exists. A perfect example is Subway, they assume everybody around the world wants to eat sandwiches.
A second strategy is the multidomestic strategy. If an organization chooses to adapt marketing strategies and product design to the specific needs of every country they operate in. This is called the multidomestic strategy, every market in each country is handled independently.
The third strategy, the transnational strategy, benefits from sides of both multidomestic and globalization strategy. The organization tries to achieve both global efficiency and local responsiveness.
The last strategy is not relavent in the Imtech case. This strategy is based on domestic focus