Large companies’ relevance in trade missions : impact on SMEs : a qualitative study on Portuguese trade missions

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Sofia Bernardo Fernandes Martins da
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/18766
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Competing in international markets used to be almost exclusive of large companies. Nowadays, this idea is utterly outdated and the internationalization of small and mediumsized enterprises is the order of the day. Governments acknowledged the importance of helping these companies in their path towards external markets, especially in the current moment, in which the effects of the European debt crisis are affecting the business community. Trade missions are part of the export promotion programs – state-owned or private - which have the ultimate goal of leveraging internationalization of firms. This dissertation intends to go deeper in the research on trade missions, trying to understand the role of large firms and their possible contributions for these export promotion tool. For that purpose, interviews were conducted to Portuguese export promotion agencies, large companies and SMEs. It was observed large companies are frequent participants of these events and they help in the promotion of the missions both in Portugal and in the host countries, having a similar role to government members. Despite that, we found small and medium-sized enterprises do not have much direct benefits from the interaction with larger companies. Networking between large firms and SMEs has much more potential than what is verified in current trade missions and should be encouraged.