The latin american international management strategy: the food industry case

The historic expansion of capitalism knew an enlargement in time and space since the end of the last century. Combining a set of globalization advantages, it generated a deeper integration and interdependence in world economy which lead to the merger of historically distinct and separated markets into an enormous global market. And, at the same time, making it more favorable for firms to cross borders and facilitating their global production and sales of products and services. Since then, many authors have been working on different international management strategies theorization. Despite the existence of many scientific articles, the vast majority of these only cover the companies’ experiences from developed markets. Otherwise, since the beginning of this new millennium, the emerging markets form the engine of world economic growth and a lot of multinationals from these countries begun to go global and assume strategic presences outside their natural markets, experiencing the most different internationalization processes. This investigation intends to analyze this tendency, looking specifically to the companies’ path from Latin American, and to understand which strategy these companies have been following to become global. Based on existing international strategy models and perspectives, we set out the analysis of seven case studies about Latin American food industry companies which will allow us to recognize which is the international strategy followed by each firm, how they organize their operations abroad in terms of multidivisional structures, what is the role of people in their internationalization processes, and how their financial partners look to this new reality.