This paper aims to investigate UK based, family‐owned, Asian firms' motives for internationalising.
This paper reports on eight interviews with the key decision‐makers in UK based, Asian, family‐owned firms.
Differences were found between two groups of firms: first, “internationally oriented Asian entrepreneurs” were those whose manufacturing operations were based in the UK but whose businesses were involved in overseas sales; second, “transnational entrepreneurs” were those who operated in two socially embedded environments and leveraged their family's resources in their country of origin in order to serve overseas markets.
The contribution of this paper is that it offers socio‐cultural insights into issues that motivated these firms to internationalise and especially those that outsourced operations to the Indian sub‐continent.
