Emerging African multi-national corporations : trends and determinants

Abstract

Despite the recent attempts to address the evolution of EMNCs, limited research has been conducted to examine EAMNCs. Moreover, the importance of this investigation is increased as it may guide African governments in drafting their policy envisaging initiating and boosting the global orientation of their domestic firms. As such, this thesis intends to examine the phenomenon of EAMNCs, with application to South Africa and Egypt. Overall statistics exhibit that both South African and Egyptian MNCs were growing outstandingly, at a different pace during the period from 1990 to 2016. However, both groups of firms significantly lost ground on the emerging MNCs landscape during that period. In 2016, South Africa owned less than a quarter of its share in the early nineties. The Egyptian outbound investment did not surpass one percent of the corresponding investments owned by emerging economies over the same period. Moreover, the outward Foreign Direct Investment Performance Indices of both countries were often less than unity, indicating that they was playing a smaller role in the global outward foreign direct investment than their economies warrant. Apart from the financial sector, the mining and quarrying sector ranked first for South African MNCs, while the industrial sector was the most important for Egyptian MNCs. The private sector dominated, to different extent, in both South African and Egyptian MNCs. Similar to emerging MNCs, South African and Egyptian MNCs both exhibited a remarkable preference to greenfield investment over mergers and acquisitions as foreign market entry mode, and to set their greenfield investments in nearby markets. The empirical research proves that trade openness, patent and the gross domestic product (GDP) and the GDP growth rate of South Africa and Egypt are dominant drivers of their outward foreign direct investment. In contrast, the number of investment treaties and inward foreign direct investment rate do not significantly influence outbound investment decisions of South African and Egyptian corporations. Regarding the pull drivers, the market size, resources endowment and proximity between home and host country are significant pull drivers of both Egyptian and South African MNCs. While not affecting Egyptian MNCs, assets availability, trade openness, the service sector quality, export to the host country, the official exchange rate of the receiving destination and the quality of institutions have an influential impact on foreign market selection of the South African investors. Inflation neither affects the attention of Egyptian firms nor South Africans to choose a certain market to invest in.