Investigating the driving forces of the formation of Chinese born global firms

The traditional internationalization process theory posits that firms expand to overseas market after solid domestic firms’ experience. However, from the 1980s, we witnessed a breed of young entrepreneurial firms, which took on internationalization early in their evolution. They are called ‘Born Globals’. This study presents an integrative conceptual framework and identifies the underlying driving forces of the formation of Chinese born global firms. Specifically, this paper employs a quantitative survey research method to examine the driving force of the formation of Chinese born global firms. It traces the phenomenon to market level driving forces, company level factors, together with entrepreneur or manager level antecedents that triggered the formation of Chinese born global firms. It applies logistic regression analysis to explore and identify different driving forces. The main findings are threefold: firstly, stronger host country customer demand and stagnated domestic market growth lead to the formation of born global firms. Secondly, more international business trip experience, conference experience and relevant industry experience of founders or high level managers give rise to greater possibility of the occurrence of born global firms. Thirdly, the more globally committed the firms are to overseas market, the more likely for them to become born global firms. We examine the hypotheses using Chinese exporting manufacturers. Respondents in the study are the export marketing managers, senior executives of the export department or even owners of the firms. These managers are directly involved in the daily exporting business of their companies; they are familiar with exporting strategy and their firms‘ export performance. In order to increase generalizability, the sampling frame is a cross-section of companies in 37 industries. We obtain the data through mail surveys to Chinese export manufacturers. Firms are identified from a popular commerce website Alibaba and the Directory of Foreign Economic and Trade Enterprises of China, a large database collected by Ministry of Commerce of the People‘s Republic of China. We tested the content validity and clarity of measures using in-depth interviews with 12 export marketing managers. We modified a few items based on their feedback. We searched the yellow page of Alibaba and collected the company‘s information of various industries such as chemistry, electronics, automobile, fabric so on. commit sufficient human into