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ENHANCING EXPORT PERFORMANCE OF EMERGING MARKET
Emerging market exporters can no longer merely rely on cost/price advantages as bases for competition. They need to keep up with environmental changes and to initiate the exploitation of market opportunities in order to accelerate foreign market expansion and financial growth. Some of these exporters have begun developing strategies to manage these environmental uncertainties of foreign markets. The adoption of such strategies are consistent with the premise underlying the environment-strategy-performance (ESP) framework, which explains how environmental changes influence strategic choices. The aim of this study was to advance our knowledge of emerging market exporters’ strategic actions by examining the extent to which these exporters utilize information and communication technology (ICTU) and behave proactively under conditions of export market dynamism, which refers to the exporters’ perceived customer-related changes in foreign markets. Literature suggests that ICTU and exporter proactiveness are essential strategic postures for exporters to enhance their performance; nonetheless, an empirical investigation that simultaneously examines both of these factors is still lacking. Our conceptual model was based on the ESP framework, integrating concepts from dynamic capabilities and information processing theory. Four corresponding hypothesized relationships were tested among a diverse sample of 259 exporters in Thailand. Existing scales were adopted to measure Export market performance (EMP), Export financial performance (EFP) and Export market dynamism (EMD) and new scales were developed for ICT utilization (ICTU) and proactive export market development (PEMD). Firm size and exporting experience were included as control variables. With the presence of common method variance (CMV), CMV-adjusted correlations were used in the analyses. Scale validation and hypotheses testing were conducted using factor analyses and structural equation modeling. The results partially substantiate the ESP paradigm, as EMD had a positive relationship with PEMD, but not with ICTU. Also, consistent with dynamic capabilities theory, our findings indicate that PEMD enhanced both EMP and EFP. The pooled data results did not provide full support of the information processing theory, as we only discovered significant EMD-ICTU-PEMD-EMP relationships amongst firms with more exporting experience. Firms with less exporting experience may not be as prepared as those with more experience in processing new information and adjusting their strategies accordingly in a timely manner. These findings have meaningful practical implications for export managers.
