Foreign Market Subsidiary Mandates

?This book investigates how foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations expand their presence and functional scope into foreign territories. It thereby focuses on how cross-border subsidiary mandates are obtained and how they develop over time. Multiple case-studies based on in-depth interviews with HQ and subsidiary management suggest that subsidiary internationalization represents a select MNC phenomenon and that associated foreign market mandates are only of temporary nature. Foreign subsidiaries appear to receive cross-border responsibility if their value proposition for overcoming liability of inter-regional foreignness is capable of more than offsetting any risk increase that stems from principal-agent relationships between corporate headquarters and foreign subsidiaries. Following the initial mandate gain, the subsidiary's restrained access to HQ-like functions, intra-MNC competition and altering localization degrees in the market covered by the mandate puts the sustainability of cross-border responsibilities at risk. As a consequence, internationalization trajectories of foreign subsidiaries often follow discontinuous rather than gradual evolutionary paths. In addition, cross-border subsidiary mandates often appear to be predefined and temporary in nature. They might actually have a limited life span from their very conception.

Nicolas Lohr earned his doctorate from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and received an MSc degree from the ESCP Europe in France. He's a consultant with an international management consulting firm.