You are the international manager of a U.S. business that has just developed a r

Question

You are the international manager of a U.S. business that has just developed a revolutionary new personal computer that can perform the same functions as existing PCs but costs only half as much to manufacture. Several patents protect the unique design for this computer. Your CEO has asked you to formulate a recommendation for how to expand in Western Europe. Your options are:

1)to export from the United States

2)to license a European firm to manufacture and market the computer in Europe

3)to set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Europe

Evaluate the pros and cons of each alternative and suggest a course of action to your CEO.

Explanation / Answer

while you evaluate the expansion into Western Europe, management will consider three options: FDI, licensing, and export.
Export:
If you assume there are no trade barriers, the key considerations would likely be transport costs and localization.
While transport costs may be quite low for a relatively light and high value product like a computer, localization can present some difficulties.   
Power requirements, keyboards, and preferences in models all vary from country to country.
It may be difficult to fully address these localization issues from the US, but not impossible.   
Setting subsidiary:
FDI (setting up a wholly owned subsidiary) is clearly the most costly and time consuming approach, but the one that best guarantees that critical knowledge will not be disseminated and that localization can be done effectively. FDI will also place you in the market into which you want to sell and allow you to be near the consumer.
Licencing:
As there are many computer manufacturers and distributors in Europe, there are likely to be a number of potential licensees. But by signing up licensees, valuable technological information may have to be disclosed, and the competitive advantage may be lost if the licensees use or disseminate this proprietary knowledge.

It is always depends on the resources that the company is having to evaluate the decision of the setting up the expansion plan.

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