Sony Corporation's Internationalization: Reflection with IB theories

Oulu Business School

Julius Francis Gomes (2364582)

Sony corporation’s internationalization analyzed in light of contemporary IB theories
721461S INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS THEORY
Department of International Business Management
December, 2013

Table of Contents
1. Introduction: 2
2. Limitation of the study: 2
3. Company history - Sony Corporation: 3
4. Literature review and analysis: 4
4.1. Learning model of Internationalization: 4
4.2. Network approach to internationalization: 6
4.3. Resource based view: 8
4.4. International new ventures – Sony as a global Start-up: 10
4.5. Dunning’s Eclectic paradigm: 12
5. Conclusion 16
References 17

1. Introduction:
Academic research concentrating on International Business as an independent field of study started in the late 1950s. It was the post-colonial period when academicians from different spheres of business and economics started to look deeply into the internationalization phenomenon of global business scenario. Dunning (1958) & Vernon (1965) were the pioneers in starting the quest of business internationalization studies. Since then research endeavors in IB have been widespread, starting from studying exclusive styles involved in IB to the reasons behind internationalizing and to explore the role of different players in international context to finally understand the impact of internationalizing.
These diverged views in research provide us with different lenses to understand the phenomenon. Different authors and thinkers have presented different perspectives and there have been many well accepted theories in the discipline of IB as organizational studies.
The more an organization’s international presence and activities are, the more views and explanations are needed to understand the big picture as argued by Wang et al. (2008). Thus this study will be an attempt to analyze the Japanese born global electronics giant Sony Corporation’s internationalization history with different popular theories of IB.
This

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