A new perspective on the regional and global strategies of multinational services firms

We explore the differences in international strategy between multinational enterprises (MNEs) in services and manufacturing, especially in terrns of their international diversification, as measured by their sales and asset dispersion. Our longitudinal data show that the largest MNEs in services have a much stronger home-region orientation than manufacturing MNEs. Large MNEs in the services sector average 83.9 percent of their sales in their home region, which is significantly higher than large manufacturing firms at 65.6 percent. We explore the possible reasons for the relative lack of globalization of services firms. The two main reasons are: the difficulty of adapting separately upstream activities and downstream activities in high distance host environments, and the difficulty of selecting activity locations as a function of supply side criteria. We offer a refinement of regional strategy theory applicable to services MNEs.