Internationalization of Brazilian companies in an emerging country: Insights from Brazilian-Russian beef network

Abstract

This article examines the internationalization of Brazilian firms in the Russian market through the revised Uppsala model (Johanson and Vahlne, 2009) in the context of emerging economies. This paper is an exploratory descriptive study with qualitative variables and is framed as a multiple case study carried out with four Brazilian meatpacking firms which internationalized their activities into the Russian market. The results show that the revised Uppsala model partially contributes to explaining the internationalization of firms studied. Some assumptions, like the link from market to market through the business network, the network’s acknowledgement of the inherent powers in the firm, the possibility of a decision of commitment in the relationship to the firm’s network and the reverse were found empirically. However, the revised Uppsala model does not envisage the use of networks limiting the expansion of firms neither the return attributes of competence and capabilities of the firm as a differential in cases of business networks with high level of commitment, found in this research.

Key words: Internationalization strategy, Business Network, Emerging Countries.