7. Concluding remarks
We present a first attempt towards analyzing how a country’s total stock of born global firms in a given industry has evolved and performed, implementing a carefully designed econometric technique to assess the conceivable counter-factual development, that is, if firms had not adopted born global strategies. This extends previous studies that have predominantly focused on selected cases, survey data or other subsamples on born global firms and complements some recent studies using longitudinal data but different methods to select control groups. No matter which definition of born global firms that is implemented, or which estimation technique or period that is used in the analysis, the results basically remain the same. We conclude that it takes time before strategies to internationalize rapidly pay off in terms of increased productivity and higher profits, whereas a positive effect is obtained for employment and sales. This is confirmed for profitability when we expand the years of the analysis, whereas a more positive effect on productivity is revealed. It is noteworthy that the quantitative effects of choosing a born global strategy decrease when we use the control group of matched firms, in some cases by about 50 percent. This suggests that firms´ adopting global strategies from inception are more likely to be dependent on access to financial resources to cover short- to medium-run costs, such as venture capital, in order to bridge possible losses. That is further supported by the negative impact of size on profitability whereas it is shown to have a positive effect on the other performance variables. Similarly, the negative effect on profitability of having Swedish affiliates indicates management or organizational weaknesses, i.e. rapid growth may strain young and small firms’ resources (compare Freeman et al., 2006).
