preview

Why Is BMW Group A Group As A Company?

Good Essays

We chose the BMW group as our company since they are an example of a multinational enterprise. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, BMW produces premium cars and has expanded into over 150 countries and is one of the large global players in the automobile industry. They compete globally thus having a lot of external pressures (e.g. competition, government regulations etc.) as well as internal ones (e.g. lower cost, focus on innovation).

2. Why is BMW Group a multinational company?
To be qualified as a multinational company (MNC), two criterions need to be fulfilled. Firstly, it needs to have substantial direct investments in foreign countries. Secondly, these international operations need to be actively managed (Bartlett, Beamish, 2014). Since …show more content…

Through the increased competition of Japanese and Korean carmakers, which sold and produced at much lower cost, BMW had to take advantage of economies of scale of scope and reduce factor costs. This was done by producing in developing countries where inputs and labor were cheaper. Consequentially BMW expanded to South Africa and later on to other emerging countries (BMW, 2015b) in order to remain competitive.
Furthermore, when expanding abroad, an MNE should: “sense, respond (…) and exploit” (Bartlett & Beamish, 2014) environmental differences between countries. When expanding to China, BMW targeted a completely different market with another currency and import taxes. Previously, China had higher import taxes in order to hedge smaller national companies from big global players. Since summer 2015 when China’s economy slowed they have lowered the import taxes in order to boost growth and investments. This might boost exports from Germany and pose an opportunity for BMW (BBC, …show more content…

The company’s history illustrates the fact that BMW made progress in its corporate strategy on an incremental basis. After the foundation in 1916, BMW Group acquired its first factory outside of its national boundaries in South Africa in 1972. The following years were characterized by gradually taking charge of sales and distribution activities in crucial foreign markets through subsidiaries. Moreover, factories were set up in the United States as well as China which evolved to an amount of 30 plants in 14 countries (BMW, 2015a). This courses of action fit into a global strategy that is determined by exploiting global efficiency. Thus, BMW set value on cost savings through economies of scale and scope, enabled by foreign factories and integrated sales and distribution operations. In this context, Berry (2009) argues that this global strategy is in accordance with the “internalization theory logic of a firm that has proprietary assets that are exploited in a standardized and integrated way across multiple country locations” and exemplifies BMW group as it “fits with this

Get Access