Multinational firms

In a recently completed study, DiMasi et al. have examined the average R D cost for drugs introduced into the market in the late 1990s. Data were collected on R D costs for a randomly selected sample of 68 investigational drugs from 10 multinational firms. DiMasi et al. found that the representative new product approval incurred out-of-pocket costs of over 400 million. This includes money spent in the discovery, preclinical, and clinical phases as well as an allocation for the cost of failures. 

U.S. multinational firms to a series of multilateral reforms of intellectual property rights regimes undertaken by 12 countries over the 1982-1999 period. They found that intellectual property rights regime changes result in increases in royalty payment flows to parent firms, and that some of the increased royalty flows represents the transfer of new technologies to the host country. 

Comments Big multinational firm with offices and/or outlets in most countries. They ve got the goods. 

An established, large, multinational firm with multiple products on the market and R D expenditures that equal between 12 and 16 percent of sales (the same as that found among almost all existing large pharmaceutical fins). 

Example. A multinational firm based in the United States is considering an investment in Mexico. The exchange rate is currently 10 Mexican pesos to 1 U.S. dollar. (There are a variety of sources available with exchange rate data, e.g., Tukiainen 1999.) Assume an investment cost of 10 million pesos with an expected annual return of 500,000 pesos per year over a five-year horizon. 

Finally, Brush et al (1999) report survey results analyzing actual international plant location decisions among large multinational firms, while various company-specific facility network design issues and decision support systems have been discussed in the applications-oriented literature—see the Breitman and Lucas (1987) work on General Motors, Davis (1993) work on Hewlett-Packard, Amtzen et al. (1995) work on Digital Equipment Corporation, and Cowie (1999) work on RCA. 

Corporation identified the social study of technology as central to their missions. Multinational firms conducted in-house seminars and funded academic projects. Finally, Charles Reich and other academic commentators suggested that the counterculture articulated new philosophies of technology expressed through lifestyle rather than monographs. 

An Australian control systems design engineer working for a multinational firm explained some of his firm s procedures ... 

Keywords Mergers and Acquisitions Multinational Firms Investment flows Chemical... 

First, the potential or actual multinational must be endowed with some firm-specific ownership advantage not available to host country firms. This requirement is usually put forward to explain why a multinational firm, which is a priori at a disadvantage compared to local firms in the host country, can profitably invest abroad. The original idea is due to Hymer, and it is commonly accepted as a necessary condition for FDI to occur. However, this proposition has recently been challenged by Fosfuri and Motta (1999) who show that in an oligopolistic context, FDI can occur even in the absence of any firm specific ownership advantage. In the latter paper, oligopolistic rivalry drives firms abroad. 

In the same line. Minority may have been expected to be more common for international transactions compared to domestic because of the acquirer s lesser familiarity with foreign markets. This is however not the case, since Minority is almost always higher for domestic than cross-border M As. A possible explanation for this latter finding is that multinational firms prefer to retain full managerial control of the their foreign subsidiaries. This is consistent with the idea that multinationals seek to avoid the diffusion of their firm specific assets to actual or potential competitors when going abroad. 

Key words Multinational Firms Research Collaborations Innovation Chemical Industry... 

In February 2014, Kenya had 39 pharmaceutical manufacturers registered with the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB). Thirty-four were producing pharmaceuticals for human health, while the rest concentrated on veterinary products (Wamae and Kariuki Kungu, 2014). There were also 20 multinational firms with local representation for marketing purposes and /or involved in clinical trials. 

This business strategy carries two kinds of risk. At firm level it abandons what one firm called the cash cows the cash-generating basic commodities this reduced their turnover and liquidity and hence capability to invest. Family firms may find this reduces their survival chances in the medium term. The largest firm, Shelys, had been sold 100% in 2012 to Aspen, the South African multinational firm now part-owned by GSK (Aspen Holdings, 2013). The Aspen annual report... 

The thesis follows the traditional structure of analysis analysis of existence of lead markets, analysis of contingency of lead markets and analysis of efficiency of lead markets. The hypothesis of existence is that there are lead markets for a broad range of innovations. The hypothesis of contingency is that several systematic nation-specific demand and market conditions can be identified that facilitate the international diffusion of innovation designs domestically preferred. These are combined in five lead market factors. The hypothesis of efficiency is that multinational firms can promote the global success of their innovations in concentrating the innovation development activities in the respective lead markets. 

In this thesis the attributes of a national market that support the commercialisation of innovations worldwide other than scientific excellence are studied. They constitute part of the demand conditions and domestic firms rivalry described by Porter (1990). Porter suggests three main attributes of home demand advantage the composition, the size and growth of home demand and the mechanism by which a nation s domestic preferences are transmitted to foreign markets. TIds thesis intends to further elaborate these demand factors, reformulate and extend the attributes of national markets and shift the focus from competitiveness of a nation s firms to the competitiveness of multinational firms reaping the benefits of the lead market. Ultimately, a different and extended typology of lead attributes of national markets based on theoretical considerations will be introduced. 

The term lead markets appears in the literature with varying meanings. Three main groups of definitions are given by literature (1) the country of the invention of an innovation, (2) the country where a subsidiary of a multinational firm takes over responsibility as global coordinator of marketing activities and (3) the country where an innovation is first widely adopted and accepted. In this thesis only the last definition will be followed. The reason for this choice is that the most innovations (e.g., PC, Fax) are available in many countries when diffusion first takes-off in one country and that this country is often not the country of the invention or innovation. Furthermore, as will be argued, innovation activity as well as... 

---