Globalisation and Small Medium Enterprises - Essay Example

executives are required to make frequent visits to foreign markets to meet foreign distributors and to participate in trade missions and trade shows. Global strategic planning is increasingly becoming essential for SMEs.IntroductionGlobalization as a business concept came to the forefront some twenty years ago. There is much more to globalization than just business conducted through export-import activities and foreign direct investments (FDI). Globalization of enterprises means the set of operations or coordinated actions, which an enterprise may take to make its presence felt in other markets or to benefit from resources originating from other markets.

And for the SMEs, with their limited resources, it is one of the toughest choices to make because of the numerous risks inherent in it. A number of SMEs, which are quite prosperous locally, fail to rise in foreign markets. Emerging SMEs in the new economic order in most of the growing market economies as well as in countries in transition are constantly in pressure to cope with the challenges of the opening market economies, especially in wake of the enlargement of the EU. For instance, Austria's inclusion into the EU brought fresh opportunities for the Austrian SMEs, however it brought considerable threats as well, for they come into confrontation with a more complex and dynamic environment.

This demands an adapted system of planning and control-tool to secure and strengthen their competencies on part of the marketing-management in SMEs. In recent years, a slew of international strategies for the SME have been analyzed and forwarded by OECD countries, however, there exist a considerable variance regarding the importance and the utilization. Yet, an area, which deserves a fair. They are worried, that there will be an effect of exclusion of SMEs, which will be pushed to the margin of this process to the advantage of better financed and more internationalized giant corporation.

In some cases this risk may be a real one." "the majority of our sample enterprises have experienced an evolution in line with the Internationalization Stages Theory, they equally use many other types of inter-enterprise accords (strategic alliances).These more flexible methods insert themselves between the more "popular strategies" within the Internationalization Stages theory (see figure 2). It is plausible to believe that the utilization of accords, as well as alleviating the problem of constraints on resources, which is a frequent problem among SMEs, opens the path towards the adoption of more important strategies as the enterprises commits itself more and more in the foreign market.

"5 "Often their (that means Entrepreneurs) first attempt at moving outside their local market is to Europeanise their activities. At a European level we are trying to make it easier for them to make that leap forward. It began with the single market process that generated a great deal of excitement at the beginning of the 1990s.