Setting the International Logistics Strategy: Empirical Investigation of Its Evolutionary Stages

Abstract

A company may face the international challenge by tackling several issues, such as international sales and marketing, international sourcing, and foreign direct investments (FDI). The academic literature firstly focused on the reasons behind company internationalisation and then adopted the above-mentioned issues related to the international challenge as perspectives in the investigation of the company internationalisation process. However, the literature review showed that the internationalisation process from a logistics perspective has not been fully investigated so far. Specifically, the relationship between company internationalisation choices and international logistics strategies has not adequately taken into account. This paper represents a first attempt to fill this gap by studying the relationship between the evolutionary stages of the company internationalisation and the key variables defining its international logistics strategy by providing empirical-based evidence. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.