Global marketing strategies: Swedish firms in South-East Asia

A number of Swedish firms have been successfully active in global marketing for more than fifty years. A relatively small home market, innovation capabilities, and a well-established network of relationships are important factors for this success. In the early years the Swedish firms were active only in Scandinavia and West European countries (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul 1975). The increasing competition and saturation of the market in Western Europe has, in latter years, led Swedish firms to less-developed countries. The economic development policies of LDCs have also been one of the factors that these countries are buying more and more technology from western countries. The Swedish firms, due to non-alliance policies of their home government, have comparative advantage over the firms coming from the western countries.