Аттестационная работа (ИАР/ВАР) на тему Borders in Cyberspace: Barriers and Opportunities for Business Internationalization

Содержание:

Abstract 5
Introduction. 6
Literature Review.. 12
Key Stages of
Internationalization. 12
Early Adoption of
Internationalization. 14
Geographical Blocking of
Products and Services in the Internet 15
Governmental, Commercial
and Technological Barriers in Cyberspace. 17
Models and Opportunities
for Business Internationalization. 18
Method and Data. 20
Case study. 20
Procedures and Design. 21
Discussion. 23
1. Choice of companies. 23
2. Analysis of Alexa’s top
rated sites. 24
2.1 Google and Google
services. 25
2.1.1 Google’s business
area. 26
2.1.2 Development in the
markets of India, Southeast Asia and China. 29
2.1.3 Barriers. 30
2.1.4 The strategy of
business internationalization. 32
2.2 Youtube as a part of
Google services. 33
2.2.1 Barriers. 34
2.2.2 Investments as way
of providing opportunities. 36
2.3 AliExpress, Taobao and
Tmall 36
2.3.1 Barriers of the
services. 37
2.3.2 Opportunities of the
services. 38
2.3.3 Competition between
online stores in China. 39
2.4 Facebook. 41
2.4.1 Borders and barriers. 43
2.4.2 Opportunities. 46
2.5 Yahoo. 48
2.5.1 Company’s barriers. 49
2.5.2 Development
strategies. 50
2.6 Zoom.. 51
2.6.1 Barriers. 52
2.6.2 Partnerships. 53
2.7 Amazon. 53
2.7.1 Barriers. 56
2.7.2 Opportunities for
the Amazon trade place. 58
2.8 Spotify. 59
2.8.1 Borders and barriers. 59
2.8.2 Development
strategies. 61
2.9 Netflix. 62
2.9.1 Barriers for Netflix. 63
2.9.2 Opportunities for
Netflix business model 64
4. Other companies. 66
4.1
Hertz. 66
4.1.1 Barriers of the
company. 67
4.1.2 Criticism towards
Hertz. Opportunities based on price formation. 67
Conclusion. 69
References. 75

Введение:

Background. The development of the world economy cannot be foreseen as economic
processes are interdependent and tend to evolve or change their usual
characteristics. Recently, there have been significant changes in the world
economy. Global players in international markets and economic development
processes are changing: the impact of developing economies is increasing
(Ering, 2011); Asian countries are cramming world leaders; companies of
developing economies invest in developed countries (Zeng & Eastin, 2012).
Moreover, the main production facilities are predominantly based in developing
economies.

The current period of globalization and
internationalization of the market is characterized by short periods of
competitive advantage. So, leading enterprises strive to continuously increase
competitiveness by creating an effective way of the organizational and economic
mechanisms. These mechanisms are innovation and investment management
processes. Implementing innovations to preserve the domestic market is not
enough, many enterprises (due to reduced sales) decide to penetrate external
markets, often characterized by lower competitive pressure. Well-established
exports increase the competitiveness of products and enterprises as a whole,
being both an incentive and a condition for innovation. Digital field gives
various opportunities for businesses to internationalize and being enhanced
(Wentrup, 2016). Nowadays, there are digital companies that are trying to
digitalize their business processes in order to penetrate other markets. These
companies are in all sectors and markets (Addison, 2006; O’Reilly, 2007; Lee et
al., 2008; Bell & Loane, 2010). Such development of business is becoming a
distinct topic (Brouthers et al., 2016; Wentrup, 2016; Nambisan, 2017).
Moreover, in the year 2020 developers of cyber products such as Zoom and
Microsoft Teams had high profits thanks to online communication and learning.

The Internet is increasingly being called
ubiquitous. It seems to be both technology, and media, and a tool for working
with data, and the space within which we communicate. The omnipresent is often
unnoticed. We hardly think about the Internet when we use it, at least until it
breaks down. And it’s not about interruptions with wi-fi or slow downloading of
films — disruptions in relations with the Internet begin when expectations from
its social role are not met. These can be the expectations of ordinary users,
politicians, researchers and public contributors. The Internet promised so much
at the beginning of its existence that many people still expect something from
it. And in the event of any failure, we try to understand where our questions
to the Internet began. This is how we
turn to his story.

The history of the Internet is a special
assemblage point where the Internet becomes visible in its entirety and variety
of problem areas. At the same time, this story is now becoming a problem in
itself — a problem of politics and knowledge. The problem of politics arises
when opponents turn to its past in search of arguments in disputes about modern
regulation of the Internet. The knowledge problem arises when researchers try
to correlate different stories of the Internet that are not alike. Of course,
these problems are connected, but the connection is not easy to grasp because
of the complexity, multi-composition, multiplicity of the phenomenon called the
"Internet". In this introductory essay, I present texts that make it
possible to discern something plural behind the (seemingly) single Internet —
and vice versa. But first you need to understand why it is important to think
about history at all — and what disruptions arise in society in connection with
the Internet. The Internet was originally a free space in which boundaries and
rules did not apply.

Different people and organizations work
with the history of the Internet: academic researchers and politicians, IT
companies and artists, museums and mass media are beginning to take an interest
in it. Interest is also emerging in the private histories of the Internet.
Users’ attitudes towards their past on the Internet are often nostalgic and
very personal. For many people, the first years of using the Internet are the
years of adolescence, when friends with the same interests first appear, the
freedom to disseminate information, the possibility of anonymous collectivity,
and creative experiments. In a surprising way, personal stories sometimes
overlap with the "big story." A user on the Internet is not a
consumer — more precisely, not just a consumer. He is also the creator of
various things, which after a while become part of a common history. This is
the case with homepages, the same is with the content on social media.

The border between the private and the
general is very shaky here. And it’s not just about changing the framework of
the private and the public. This framework changes all the time. The history of
the Internet exists in a situation when we already know for sure that the
general history is made up of many private plots. Since the beginning of the
last century, it has become commonplace to understand that history is not only
the exploits of heroes, but also everyday life, from hygiene standards to
clothing, reading habits, and so on. The Internet, among other things, has
become one of the ways in which private stories and collective memories are
assembled. Users on the Internet turn out to be spontaneous archivists and
historians, each of our posts or actions on the Internet is an act and at the
same time a digital footprint.

The semantic interpretation of time is a
mechanism by which the coordination of the cultural, social and individual
world of a person takes place. With the advent of the Internet in our life, it
is the semantic interpretation of time that is changing, which can lead to
certain socio-cultural changes in society. Since the time of Aristotle, people
have associated time with movement, but this principle has already been
questioned more than once in the history of human thought. The physicist Costa
de Beauregard discovered that time is measured by change, and change by time,
and this contradiction has not yet been overcome by modern science. Russian
mathematician NI. Lobachevsky also noticed this contradiction and gave a
definition of time: "The movement of one body, taken as known in
comparison with another, is called time." It is possible that linking time
to movement prevents modern science from finding the key to time management.
Metamorphoses that occur over time in virtual space, where there is no physical
movement of bodies, but only the movement of information flows, indicate to us
the temporal uncertainty of the Internet space, in which it is possible to set
any time scales and durations. Virtual time, as well as mythological time, is
nonlinear and has an inversion, the time vector can be directed not only
forward, but also back into the past. For example, among the modern peoples of
Tropical Africa, traditional time exists and develops in both directions, i.e.
past generations are actively involved in the life of current generations, and
even after death they strengthen the social influence that they had during
life. Nevertheless, time travel, which humanity so dreams of, is unrealistic in
virtual space due to the impossibility of fully recovering information about
past events and accurately reproducing future events. We can only plunge into
the simulated past or future, which, in fact, is the present, which indicates
the irreversibility of virtual time.

The Internet space has firmly entered the
life of a modern person, it is a specific socio-cultural phenomenon and is a
meta-environment for communication, storage and processing of an unlimited
amount of information. The number of Internet users is growing steadily and
today it is more than 2 billion people worldwide. One of the reasons for such
an amazing popularity of the Internet is, perhaps, the fact that from a
psychological point of view, virtual communication is much easier than real. A
person communicates in the virtual space created by him, sometimes even under a
fictitious name, the social status of the individual is modeled. When immersed
in the Internet space, part of the consciousness remains in reality and space,
and part is immersed in virtual space and time. Thus, a person is in a
transitional borderline state, which is unstable, indefinite and carries the
danger of physiological and psychological dependence. The Internet has its own
space and time, which is associated with the real space and time of human
consciousness.

In the Internet space, physical reach does
not exist, but interaction is present, there is an exchange of information, and
not a material exchange of matter or energy, from which we can conclude that it
is time that matters in this case, and not space. It is time that synchronizes
the activities of almost all of humanity, and we can now talk about “temporal
totalitarianism”. The process of synchronization of all social processes
developed gradually with an increase in the living space of a person, starting from
a primitive tribe, a local settlement, the emergence of independent cities,
large states (Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt), empires (Roman, Byzantium) and
practically ended at the end of the XX century with the emergence Internet
space. Such a global synchronicity of the life of our planet is convenient for
humanity, but it can lead to the erasure of boundaries, the unification of
social activities and communication.

At the beginning of the development of the
Internet, the number of network users was small and the amount of information
was relatively small. In the vast majority of cases Internet users were
employees of various universities or scientific organizations. During this time
the search for the necessary information on the network was not as relevant as
it is now. Today, search engines have become a multifunctional service. They
allow users to find a wide variety of information on the Internet, so they enjoy
great success.

One of the first attempts to organize
access to network information resources was the creation of thematic
directories of sites. The first, which opened in April 1994, was Yahoo. This
was not yet a search engine, in the modern sense, since the ability to search
for information was limited to resources registered in the Yahoo catalog.
Reference catalogs were previously used quite widely, but have now almost lost
popularity. The explanation for this is very simple — even modern catalogs
containing a huge amount of resources, only provide information about a rather
small part of the network. For comparison, the most complete directory of the
Internet — DMOZ contains information about 12,000,000 resources, while the
database of the most complete search engine Google consists of more than
28,000,000,000 documents.

The first full-fledged search engine in
1994 became a project WebCrawler. Further in 1995, the search engines AltaVista
and Lycos appeared. In 1997, at Stanford University, as part of a research
project, Google was created — the most popular search engine in the world at
the moment. In 1997, a search engine appeared — Yandex, the leader in the
Russian-speaking part of the Internet. At the moment, the main search engines
are three international ones — Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. The rest, which
are not few, use the entire or partially bases and (or) algorithms of the above
systems.

Eventually, here are the research questions
which we have: “what are the barriers in business internationalization in
cyberspace?” and “what are the opportunities and optimal strategies for
business internationalization in cyberspace?”. For now, we cannot answer these
questions fully but some thoughts and visions are established and formulated
based on the anticipated results. The thesis of the research is to determine
general opportunities and strategies for internationalization based on the
barriers in the cyberspace. The importance of the topic can be explained by the
fact that in technological world it is needed to use all innovative approaches
and new possibilities for business prosperity. Business internationalization in
the internet is one of the options which could be used by firms. Main gap of
term paper is that qualitative method as case study is not enough for full
identification of the research question “what are the opportunities and optimal
strategies for business internationalization in cyberspace?” because it is
needed some strong evidences that such strategies and opportunities have real
impact on companies` working processes.

The result of the study can be argued to
give implications for online service providers when looking to expand to new
international markets. Firms could obtain better knowledge of how to manage
their internationalization process. This study enhances opportunity of lowering
risks entering other markets and described overall situation that will help
businesses in strategic management.

The study has offered detailed analysis of
barriers and opportunities in internationalization and they affect firms’
strategies. Lack of scientific severity and granting of small basis for
generalization of results to the wider population are main limitations of any
case study research, which need to be considered. One more limitation was the
number of businesses which operate especially in cyberspace. Type of method
implemented in this research require big volume of information and time, which
are restricted.

This research leads to future possible
research areas, both theoretical and practical. Recommended research for the
future could be more specific studies about factors of barriers in
internationalization through the internet, mechanisms of internationalization
in cyberspace, best market for development, the phenomena of price
discrimination in different countries and difference between traditional
internationalization and expansion in cyberspace. All these topics are
controversial and their detailed explanation is required. It may give base for
future studies.

Thus, relying on all issues above, the
research about business in cyberspace and its internationalization is rather
not obvious and of course, it should be further analyzed. Main barriers as
governmental, commercial and technological ones are described which companies
use for their operations in the internet. Moreover, there are suggested some
strategies and possibilities for business development and success. Delimitations. As for the delimitations of the study, only 20 companies will be
chosen as qualitative analysis takes a lot of time and attention. It is enough
to make conclusions and reject or accept hypothesis, although there will be no
opportunity to claim precisely that some strategies are useful as our sample is
relatively small. There will be always a probability that some business models
were not included in the study.

Problem
Statement. The aim of the study is to determine
general impediments, opportunities and strategies for internationalization in
order to simplify the search of answer to the question “How does
internationalization work in the internet and how companies act in such conditions?”

The phenomenon of digitalization is growing
in enterprises (Brouthers et al., 2016; Nambisan, 2017; Wentrup, 2016) and it
has perspectives. We are living in fast-moving world, where act operationally
is important. Otherwise, leading on the market is impossible. Thus, several
research questions have been defined: “What are the barriers in business
internalization in cyberspace?” and “What are the opportunities and optimal
strategies for business internationalization in cyberspace?”.

Theoretical
and Professional Significance. The research may
become applicable for some businesses and help to find the optimal way of
development and growth. The topic of the relationships of businesses in the
cyberspace is wide and not new, but today, when there are a lot of innovative
technologies, startups, and studies which operate with cyberspace and Internet
technologies, it is important to find out how all these aspects are managed and
affect each other. The topic is relevant because: firstly, any discrimination
in the world now is important for any sphere (e.g., sex, race or price
discrimination); secondly, the problem is that some products sell in the world
from one company, but one of these products (which have minor variations) is
not on the market of some country for example Russia from this firm because of
different reasons such as governmental laws or social divisive. It is not clear
from consumers why they cannot buy it in their country of origin, why company
cannot adapt this product for their market and also have profits from them and
have more customers.

Заключение:

Conclusion

Eventually, here are the research questions
which we have: “what are the barriers in business internationalization in
cyberspace?” and “what are the opportunities and optimal strategies for
business internationalization in cyberspace?”. For now, we cannot answer these
questions fully but some thoughts and visions are established and formulated
based on the anticipated results. The thesis of the research is to determine
general opportunities and strategies for internationalization based on the
barriers in the cyberspace. The importance of the topic can be explained by the
fact that in technological world it is needed to use all innovative approaches
and new possibilities for business prosperity. Business internationalization in
the internet is one of the options which could be used by firms. Main gap of
term paper is that qualitative method as case study is not enough for full
identification of the research question “what are the opportunities and optimal
strategies for business internationalization in cyberspace?” because it is needed
some strong evidences that such strategies and opportunities have real impact
on companies` working processes.

The result of the study can be argued to
give implications for online service providers when looking to expand to new
international markets. Firms could obtain better knowledge of how to manage
their internationalization process. This study enhances opportunity of lowering
risks entering other markets and described overall situation that will help
businesses in strategic management.

The study has offered detailed analysis of
barriers and opportunities in internationalization and they affect firms’
strategies. Lack of scientific severity and granting of small basis for
generalization of results to the wider population are main limitations of any
case study research, which need to be considered. One more limitation was the
number of businesses which operate especially in cyberspace. Type of method
implemented in this research require big volume of information and time, which
are restricted.

This research leads to future possible
research areas, both theoretical and practical. Recommended research for the
future could be more specific studies about factors of barriers in
internationalization through the internet, mechanisms of internationalization
in cyberspace, best market for development, the phenomena of price
discrimination in different countries and difference between traditional
internationalization and expansion in cyberspace. All these topics are
controversial and their detailed explanation is required. It may give base for
future studies.

Technological fragmentation of Google is
associated with a variety of platforms that a client can use to access an
application, such as via the Internet, an iPhone, or an Android device. This
fragmentation is a fact of life in software development, regardless of the
platform used to deploy the application. Initially, companies had to support
clients using different operating systems (OS), then they had to support
different web browsers, and now we have to support different devices, OS and
browser engines.

Several platforms are time-consuming and
expensive to maintain. This means that developers need to consider the
characteristics of each platform in addition to real business logic when they
work on the application. And it’s not just the code: decisions made about
frameworks, tools, and processes also affect team productivity, product lead
times, and service costs. As more resources are needed to manage fragmented
technologies, the impact on net profits is also increasing.

The main governmental fragmentation is
related with The "Great Chinese Firewall". It is responsible for
security on the Chinese Internet, which blocks not only websites, but also
filters information related to such important topics as religion, freedom of
speech, democracy. A number of requests, for example, "Taiwan
independence," are not processed at all by search engines. Some experts
believe that the requirements for information published on the Internet have
tightened with the coming to power of Chinese President Xi Jinping: if earlier
the restrictions concerned only web pages, now they have affected social
networks and chats. Google’s desire to return to the world’s largest Internet
market is understandable. But, before launching a new search service in China,
the company will have to get the approval of the Beijing authorities and make
sure that their program works more effectively than the program of the main
player in the Chinese Internet market — Baidu.

The technical fragmentation of the YouTube
service is due to several factors. Among them are:

1. Fragmentation of the audience into a
large number of relatively small consumer groups, each of which has its own
specific audience interest. A homogeneous mass audience is rapidly losing its
share;

2. Personal fragmentation. Consumers are
increasingly allocating their time and money spent on media content across many
media channels.

3. Content fragmentation. Consumers
increasingly prefer to receive snippets of newspapers or television programs
"customized" for their individual interests, moreover, from many
sources at the same time, instead of extracting the information they are
interested in from full editions themselves.

The consumer is increasingly expecting new
ways of accessing media content from the industry, demanding that only the
content that interests him is provided to him and that the provided content is
available to him wherever and whenever he wants, on any platform and on any
device. Manufacturers have no choice but to respond to consumer fragmentation
with fundamentally new offerings. Suffice it to recall that in the film
industry over the past 50 years, almost 100% of the revenue growth has come
from new markets (home video) and new technologies (DVD). Another example: with
the release of the Apple iTunes music service and Apple iPod players, the
popularity of music on traditional physical media is falling — over 4 years,
sales of music CD albums fell by 23%.

Tmall has one big difference and it is B2C
system which need for tmall.com internationalization approaches and techniques,
mainly translation and world logistics as products which are selling on the
site are from different countries. As for critics of the Tmall, site has
problems with scams and frauds towards buyers, but such problems are not unique
for internet trade.

The governmental fragmentation is related
with the fact that Taobao is aimed at the domestic market (China) and so that
has C2C system. However, for further research it is needed to analyze
AliExpress. This site is aimed at the international markets. Moreover,
AliExpress was also an opportunity for Taobao to enter the international market
and had incredible success.

Thus, commercial fragmentation barriers
which are used by Taobao and Tmall are distribution of the products and
services for all clients by, firstly, commercial relations between the
organization and consumers and, secondly, by domestic and international
markets.

A number of reasons can be distinguished
among the means of technical fragmentation. Despite the fact that, according to
Zuckerberg himself, "Our philosophy is that information belongs to users,
as well as control over its distribution," Facebook claims its rights to
the fruits of other people’s intellectual property, refusing to return users
their own content from remote for one reason or another, pages, thereby
alienating the fundamentally inalienable copyright and going against the norms
of international law regarding the protection of copyright and related rights.

Based on its user agreement, Facebook
reserves the right to freely and at its discretion to handle user information
even after the user account is removed from the network (previously, user
content was stored on the company’s servers indefinitely even after the
corresponding account was deleted. at its discretion to use the contact
information of users (email addresses and phone numbers) .In August 2013,
Facebook published the first report on the amount of partially transmitted
information that it was forced to transmit in the first half of 2013 in
response to 25 thousand requests from governments of various states to receive
information on 38 thousand users.

In the case of Yahoo!, finding new ideas
for new services was quite simple. The company began to purchase developed web
projects and create its own products on their basis. So, in 1997, the free
postal service RocketMail was purchased. The Yahoo! Mail was developed on its
basis. In 1998 ClassicGames and eGroups were purchased, which then rebranded in
Yahoo! Games and Yahoo! Groups respectively.

In 1996, Yahoo! and the Japanese
telecommunications corporation SoftBank formed a joint company Yahoo! Japan.
Its portal (yahoo.co.jp) with its own blog services, mail, etc., is the most
visited site in Japan.

Attempting to access Google or Yahoo! users
are automatically redirected to the page of the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Authorities did not give friendly ecosystem for foreign tech-corporations by
developing restrictions. Their political trend is aimed on developing of
domestic corporations.

Niche of search engines is already well
known and developed market. It has its history that is why it becomes more or
less predictable to invest in and internationalize. In case of Google and
Yahoo, there is no significant barriers to internationalize except one –
politics. Issues of economic interest can be solved by purchasing already
developed projects and companies why has their representation on the market.
Technological issues are also solvable by changing domain and delegating of
development of local element (maps, language, updates, news and others). The
only problem is political interest. In case of Baidu, Chinese government
decided to increase entry costs for foreign corporations. Restrictions are so
high, that domestic search engine Baidu became the one leader in the whole
country. To sum up, there are useful strategies and opportunities like
purchasing successful company or register representation in another country and
personalize product into features of locals.

The Zoom services also have some technical
fragmentation. In an email to employees detailing security vulnerabilities,
Google banned the use of Zoom on company-owned employee devices and warned that
the software will stop working with the device this week. Zooming is competitor
to the Google Hangout Meet app. In an email to BuzzFeed, a Google spokesperson
said employees are using Zoom while working remotely will need to look
elsewhere and that Zoom does not meet our security standards for the applications
used by our employees". Coordinated mass zoomscopes, where attackers
pursue and abuse closed meeting participants. Abuses reported during Zoomraids
including the use of racist, anti-Semitic and pornographic images, and verbal
harassment.

Considering the govermental fragmentation
of this service, German newspaper Handelsblatt announced that the German
Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered their employees to stop implementing Zoom
due to security concerns. "Because of the associated risks for our IT
system as a whole, we have, like other departments and industrial companies,
also decided for the (Federal Foreign Office) not to allow the use of Zoom on
the devices used for business purposes," the ministry said in a statement.
Taiwan government agencies told not to use Zoom due to security problems with
Taiwan Cybersecurity Department allowing to use alternatives such as products
from Google and Microsoft.

Amazon is one of the famous companies in
the world, but it does not mean that it is popular in every country and
everyone knows it or use. On the site amazon.com there is information about who
can trade and buy on Amazon and who cannot. Government fragmentation, in this
case, creates technical and commercial fragmentation as the site follows its
own trading policy.

For example, some Eurozone countries as
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece and many
others can trade as well as many others as Russia, China, Croatia, South Korea
and etc. However, in the list on amazon.com there are list of countries which
do not have access to Amazon goods and services: Cuba, Iran, North Korea,
Sudan, Syria. Moreover, Amazon also restricted in some locations certain items
due to their content: Algeria, Libya, Bahrain, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Morocco
and etc.

Spotify has set up an artist relationship
division, hosts parties, workshops and has established a Secret Genius award
for composers, producers and publishers who remain behind the scenes in the
music show business. The technical, governmental and commercial fragmentation
of this service is caused by a number of problems with its content. One of the
most popular artists to remove their music from the catalog in the crisis year
of 2014 was Taylor Swift. In a post on the social network, she accused Spotify
of devaluing musicians’ work by the very presence of free users on the platform
and the unfair distribution of income. Daniel took all the blame for the lack
of understanding by her and her record label of the principles of the service
on himself; since 2017, the music of Taylor Swift, other artists from her label
Big Machine Records, Radiohead and many others are back on the site.

Netflix’s online DVD rental could offer a
much larger selection of films than Blockbuster rentals. But when they first
offered free streaming content to their subscribers in 2007, it contained no
more than 1,000 movies and TV shows, just 1% compared to over 100,000 DVD
products. However, as the popularity of the new type of content continued to
grow, the number of options available for streaming also grew, reaching 12,000
films and shows in June 2009. The recommendation system, known as Cinematch,
not only tied viewers to use the service, but also outputted underrated films
for customers to watch based on their recommendations. This attribute benefited
not only the company, but also the viewers and film studios involved in their
creation.

Thus, relying on all issues above, the
research about business in cyberspace and its internationalization is rather
not obvious and of course, it should be further analyzed. Main barriers as
governmental, commercial and technological ones are described which companies
use for their operations in the internet. Moreover, there are suggested some
strategies and possibilities for business development and success.

Фрагмент текста работы:

Literature
Review

In this chapter different studies on
barriers for internationalization and their types, digitalization and
relationship in businesses of different countries, borders and opportunities in
cyberspace in the world will be discussed. Most of the literature has different
explanations and examples of cyberspace limitations such as blocking of the
products, services or data in different countries; copyright problems in the
internet; internationalization of the cyberspace; price discrimination;
technological, commercial and political barriers.

Key Stages of Internationalization

The internationalization of business is a
very multifaceted phenomenon. Countries enter into the international division
of labor when they reach a certain level of development of the productive
forces (Livingstone, 1989). This applies to all areas of activity. Based on
this, business internationalization is the process of establishing links
between different countries, provided that the production capacity of one state
is considered part of the global production process. The main methods of
internationalization include: export, import, investment deposits, licensing,
quotas and franchising. Such methods help countries and companies reach various
agreements, contracts and deals.

However, to properly explain the aim of the
research, it is also needed to highlight how business internationalization
exists in the cyberspace, as previously this concept is described for any
company, but the current project requires to define it in terms of the internet
environment as well. According to Sigfusson & Harris (2012), social network
and relationships in the cyberspace created a base for firms and entrepreneurs
on the international market and give a possibility for development and business
internationalization. Therefore, business internationalization in the
cyberspace can be described as follows: it is a concept of association of
businesses in a single platform via internet technologies which allows to
spread and sell products and services in different countries. The methods of
internationalization which are used in the internet are: advertising, social
networks, web-resources (sites and search engines).

Some authors also highlight 5 steps of
internationalization of a firm (Campbell & Rao, 2015; Hutzschenreuter et
al., 2016).

Stage 1: domestic market company.
Initially, the firm’s market is exclusively domestic. The company limits its
activities, mission, and vision to national borders. The company focuses on the
opportunities of the internal market, internal suppliers, works with internal
financial companies and, accordingly, has only internal customers/buyers. A
company operating in the domestic market does not think twice and does not
remain committed to growing or scaling the business in one direction. It is
much easier to engage in superficially many processes than to risk and try to
be the best in the world in one narrow direction. Domestic companies grow
through diversification, i.e. entering new domestic markets, new products,
technologies, etc. The strategy of expansion into international markets remains
outside of its vision.

Stage 2: export company. At the 2nd stage
of business internationalization, the company expands the sales market,
entering the market of a particular country in turn, but at the same time
maintaining production facilities within the internal borders of the country of
residence. As a result, the companies of the 2nd stage of internationalization
come to the conclusion that their technological superiority allows them with a
small degree of localization of products/services to continue scaling the
business in foreign markets (innovation).

Stage 3: international company. A company
enters the international category when it begins to physically move some of its
operations outside the country of residence (subsidiaries or joint ventures are
opened). Sooner or later, the export company will learn that the practiced
expansion strategy (product sales expansion, price level, and features of
promotion to foreign markets) will not work in all markets. Thus, companies
begin to formulate different strategies for different markets, and thus its
cultural orientation shifts from ethnocentric to polycentric: the offices,
branches, subsidiaries of a multinational company begin to function as a
"local" company in each of the countries of operation, localizing
processes and strategies. And at this stage companies start to use the Internet
as a tool for creating new markets and attracting people from different
countries.

Stage 4: global company. The next stage of
development is the transformation of the company into a full-fledged
multinational corporation with assembly and production facilities in several
countries and regions of the world. Global companies have some decentralized
decision-making, but many personnel decisions are still made at corporate
headquarters. A global company is one that has either a global marketing
strategy or a global production strategy. A global company either manufactures
in its home country and markets these products worldwide, or manufactures
products worldwide and focuses on marketing these products domestically.

Stage 5: multinational company. Companies
that reach the transnational level are called transnational, because they no
longer remain loyal to the country of origin. Operations are highly
decentralized, meaning each division is free to make personnel decisions with
little oversight from corporate headquarters. The company manufactures, sells
and invests worldwide.

In order to define the field of research,
it is important to define meaning of cyberspace as a tool of development for
companies. It refers to the combination of all information resources available
through the Internet. Moreover, it is a space that is simulated and mediated by
electronic devices (Sigfusson & Chetty, 2013). In this thesis, cyberspace
is considered as ability for businesses to access a broader base of customers
via Internet.

Early Adoption of
Internationalization

The phenomenon of internationalization has
been widely discussed by academia and business. Traditionally, born-global
firms are considered as early adopters of the internationalization (Knight
& Cavusgil, 2004). The scholars investigated innovative culture in
international business, focusing on innovative culture and when internet became
more popular for entrepreneurs. The main aim of the project is to define
innovation points, information and capabilities in the activity of the company
through case study and quantitative research. So, the description of the early
adopters of the internationalization can help to find out general background
and prerequisites of the internationalization itself. In the era when the
Internet is becoming the main resource and tool for attracting people, which
has started approximately since 2004 (Johnson, 2004), internet itself was a
large base for development and communication through various channels.
Companies started to use it considerably for promotion and advertising. Moreover,
firms also allowed people interact between each other (Brouthers et al., 2016)
and share their opinions and feedbacks through their platforms. It sets a start
for companies and an option for international distribution of services and
goods as it can be easily organized and maintained through the cyberspace
(Johnson, 2004) which can give new relationship, contracts and opportunities
really fast and easy.

Such development and
adaptation of cyberspace allow people as previously mentioned, communicate with
each other. Companies and industries had new challenges in the
internationalization such as enterprises had to understand fundamentally how to
create new business environment (Anh Khoa Dam et al., 2019) which should
include all restrictions, permissions and agreements between other companies
and countries. Each country has its laws and prohibitions which vary in every
place on the planet. However, firms had problems and obstacles with customer
attractiveness and interests as they are not keen on in legislation, laws and
prohibitions of their countries extremely and for them international and
foreign company is uninviting. New products and innovative ideas, analyzing
data were implemented and created by CEO’s and their employees (Anh Khoa Dam et
al., 2019) during brainstorming and discussions