Internationalisation Of Small To Medium Sized Businesses In An Economic Crisis

Terms such as internationalisation, transnational and global are often excessively used in books, the media and the Internet. They are often capable of causing confusion to those who have not included it at least once in the syntax of its own business structure.

A recent report by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development concerning the state of the Italian economy in terms of trade with foreign countries, clearly showed the economic downturn affected all productive sectors and also had an impact on consumer confidence dropping by 10.4% from the previous year. While exports have shown a steady growth with the success of 'made in Italy' products on the international markets, the information that emerged regarding imports clearly showed a decline in the 2012 economic downturn that affected all productive sectors.

In comparison to Europe, it is clear that there has also been a sharp increase in data compared to 2011 related to trade with new European countries, with a variation of 11.5% in exports and 9.6% in imports.

This data reflects the same phenomenon of opening towards the markets outside Europe with a constant and growing trend. The leading country in this trend is Germany which over the analysed period exported goods and services for a value of 992.3 billion Euros, while Italy has still recorded a growth with 325.6 billion Euros. Spain, Greece and Portugal saw a decrease in imported goods during 2012 at the same time as Italy which saw a drop of 5.5%. The likelihood of this is due to the decreasing purchase power and hold off from investment. Some countries tend to export more than what they import and a result of this allows non European countries to buy affordable prices while we pay more for theirs and import them less.

With reference to goods, Italian exports have seen a significant increase in October of 2012 of 8.6%, while the imports decreased to 3.2%. Looking at Italy compared to other industrial countries, the data confirms the health of our 'made in Italy' products and therefore the strength of our companies to react to the effects of the international crisis. In 2012, the Italian exports of goods and services amounted to 6.7%, with a higher position than France that registers 5.3% and United Kingdom with 4.6%. Germany registers 7.8%, which owes its success to export of technology in the favor of the emerging countries, particularly China. It is "the best result ever reached by Italy", as stated by a report from...