Venturing overseas: Strategic approaches adopted by foreign food companies in Malaysia

The theoretical underpinnings of this paper focus on foreign investment, modes of entry, export marketing, strategic alliances, investment criteria, firm characteristics, international strategy, external factors, and host and home country factors, and Asian culture and management. The research project presented in the paper was initially designed to obtain case study information on a number of foreign food companies which had invested in Malaysia, especially in terms of their strategic approaches, investment bases and market share achievement. However, subsequent to the preliminary discussions with the respondent companies, the researchers believed that the conventional models needed to be studied further. This research was undertaken via both structured and unstructured interviews of 11 multinational companies. The results demonstrated that there are both significant similarities and differences between the strategic approaches adopted by major global multinationals and minor regional multinationals and uncovered new investment‐market share strategies not previously covered in the literature. These results are discussed at length in this paper, and form the essence of the contribution to knowledge of the research project.