International Portfolio

The enterprises which are moving into multiple number of countries will have international portfolio (overall combination). The selection of pattern also requires strategic decision.

Let us try to learn in brief regarding the theory concerning the selection here. The first selection concerns the relationship between the individual operations which constitute the portfolio and the making of overall characteristic. The second selection deals with the distribution of roles for respective country. These two selections, of course are not independent of each other.

The first selection deals with the selection of basic policy regarding the way the countrywise competition should be, and the basic selection branches are multi-domestic, global and glocal.

· Multi domestic
This is a policy of adopting the strategy of product, production and marketing, maching the requirements of the respective countries, where the individual country considers it as a diversified existence. The strategy of internationalisation of overall enterprise is the simple composite of the respective countrywise strategies. The degree of cooperation of operations carried out countrywise is not very strong.

· Global
The world is seen as one entity and common products are provided to as many countries as possible if there is common demand trend. The global policy concerns building up a world level system for the product and supply of such goods in the most efficient manner. The respective countrywise strategies form part of global strategy.

· Glocal
The term glocal has been derived by combining glocal and local. This is an intermediate policy between multi domestic and global. In the case of glocal, the policy, which forms the core fore for the global strategy is retained while an autonomous strategy to deal with the requirements of each country is also formulated. For doing so the respective countrywise strategies do not form a part of global strategy and the global strategy also does not work for simplification and harmonisation of the respective country strategies.

The second selection deals with the problems of distribution of roles of the respective countries in the portfolio. For example, there can be a case where the plant responsible for research and development is located in Japan, the production base is located in America and Europe is targeted as sales market.
Various type of patterns can be considered for the selection of such types of distribution of roles.