Examining the Evolution of Emerging Market Multinational Enterprises’ Competitive Advantages: Evidence from India

Using a large panel dataset on Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs) spanning over a period of 20 years, from 2000 to 2019, we explore how emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) are evolving their capabilities to catch-up with their global peers. We employ the springboard perspective and the global factory framework for providing theoretical foundations to our empirical exposition. We argue that the cross-border acquisitions (CBAs)-led asset augmentation strategy leads to the process of EMNEs’ evolution by internalizing intangible assets, such as brand and advanced sophisticated technology. This helps EMNEs to not only enhance their marketing- and technology-related capabilities but also to internationalize further. However, in this process EMNEs trade-off their existing production-related capabilities. We make significant contributions to the extant literature by exploring the effects of CBA-led asset augmentation strategy and extending the application of global factory framework to the case of EMNEs.