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This article describes the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of a German ship-owning outfit (HCI Hammonia Shipping AG) in the German market and outlines its development over the first couple of years on the market, until August 2012. Directed mainly at institutional investors, the stock-listed company hit the market in an environment overwhelmingly dominated by the “KG-system” as most popular equity gathering method. However, the HCI Hammonia AG’s business model is rooted in its home market as it owns container ships that are chartered out to container shipping lines. Against all odds, the company thrived even through the first years of the downturn.

As Section 2.2 shows, internationalization is often the result of unsatisfactory prospects in the home market. Portfolio analysis and the Ansoff matrix of growth options are two tools used in strategic analysis which can help a domestically based company to investigate the possibilities of entering new markets. We now present each in turn.

In recent decades an embryo of a new theory of specialisation and trade has been developed with an emphasis on differentiated competition, scale economies and size of the “home market” (e.g. Krugman, 1990). As regards the size of the home market several contributions focus on the country as the potential home market (e.g. Porter, 1990), which may be described as an ad hoc approach without any clear theoretical underpinning. In response to this type of deficiencies, this paper introduces a theoretical framework based on the concepts of a functional region and its product-specific market potentials. This approach is developed to improve the analysis of small and medium-sized regions, with an emphasis on their internal and external market interactions.

Antidumping and antidumping regulations often create friction between trading partners. In recent years, related disputes have also spread to high technology industries like semiconductors and, more recently, liquid crystal displays (LCD). The ultimate aim of antidumping regulations is the protection of domestic industry, all be it only temporarily. This protection can be motivated by four sets of considerations. First, the pricing strategies of foreign firms can be judged anticompetitive. Predatory pricing in which foreign firms attempt to drive out domestic producers and monopolize the home market, and limit pricing, which prevents domestic producers from entering the market, are typical examples. Second, the pricing strategy of foreign firms — although not anticompetitive — can be considered harmful because it obstructs the development of important domestic industries. Third, antidumping duties can be temporarily levied in order to allow domestic producers to adjust to a new competitive situation in international markets. Fourth, antidumping can be motivated by other — more general — protectionist interests of the domestic industries affected.

Business operations have generally become more internationalized in recent decades. There has also been a widening of the national origin of so-called multinational enterprises, which own and control productive assets in more than one country. Such firms used to emanate almost entirely from Western Europe and North America. The dominance of westerners is now being challenged particularly by the rise of Japanese multinationals, which rapidly expand their activities in all major markets. Their efforts are not reciprocated by western firms, and the Japanese home market remains relatively untouched by foreign-based corporations. In fact, the Japanese are becoming dominant in East Asia as a whole, which is the fastest growing region in the world.

The peculiarity of Strategic International Marketing resides in the fact that it is not restricted to the sales and purchase markets proper, but that the environment of these markets becomes the major decision parameter. It is only when environmental considerations are taken into account that strategic international marketing decisions can be made. These make special demands on the information and decision processes of companies, as environmental factors first of all present themselves in a more differentiated form than is the case on the home market, because they contain political, legal, social and cultural elements which can be taken for granted at home. Secondly, they are more varied, since the world market consists of a multitude of different national and also regional sub-markets, in each of which environmental factors bear a different stamp and have a profound importance for market opportunities and risks. The significance of environmental factors for Strategic International Marketing implies that commercial decision processes are to a large extent determined not just by national economic, world-economic and world-political factors, but also by cultural ones. The traditional dividing line between business management theory and economic theory (particularly political economy), thereby loses its significance. There arises rather a typical continuum of micro- and macroeconomic determining factors.