Going West: The Internationalization Process of Asian Information Technology Multinational Companies. A qualitative case study overview on patterns and strategic approaches.

In the last decades, Asian innovative IT companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Softbank are experiencing a fast boom led by the tech hype they generated among both Eastern and Western markets. These Asian companies started to be more important players in the global tech landscape, becoming real innovative rivals for Western companies. Gradually, the Asian tech giants are developing an important strategic key role for the next years. This research made an attempt to investigate how these companies firstly developed, and later on evolved their internationalization process towards Western countries. The data collection process and the analysis were guided by the conceptual model, which was created through theoretical research. Most of the theory is confirmed by the significant findings. The evidence of the absence of a clear path for the overall internationalization process corresponds with the theoretical propositions about the internationalization process of Multinational companies originated by the Asian region, which share characteristic of the IT sector.