Be an International Business Professional

Understand the key terms of international business, the domestic versus international market distinction, and who participates to enter markets, find buyers, and exhibit at trade fairs.

Define international business as trade and investment activities across national borders, including consumer cross-border purchases. Highlight globalization, risk differences, and foreign market entry strategies, plus international trade and investments.

Differentiate internationalization from globalization by focusing on companies expanding internationally versus countries becoming economically integrated. Use exports and imports as examples of moving from internationalization to globalization.

Discover international trade, including exporting and importing across borders, and compare international investments: portfolio investments are short-term, while foreign direct investment is long-term and substantial.

Explore how services are exported alongside goods, highlighting architecture, banking, education, entertainment, information services, professional services, transportation, and travel as key international trade flows.

Define and compare domestic marketing, export marketing, international marketing, and multi-domestic marketing, and examine how firms adapt campaigns across domestic and foreign markets.

Identify four major international business risks—cross-cultural, country, currency, and commercial risk—and how they differ from domestic markets. Examine participants, from multinationals to born-global tech firms and government and NGO buyers.

Explore why studying international business enhances global connectivity, boosts national and firm competitiveness, and enables sustainable, informed decisions across domestic and international markets.

Learn how culture shapes international business by understanding cross-cultural risk, the dimensions and symbols of culture, and how respecting others' values, language, and norms can influence negotiations and deals.

An international business professional course highlights six cross-cultural risks in global interactions, including greetings, gestures, card sharing, gifts, eating habits, and personal space.

Characterize culture as a way of life, a collective mental programming that acts like software guiding behavior and is shaped by upbringing and religion.

Define culture by what it is not—it's not right or wrong, not about individual behavior, and not inherited—then value each culture with a geocentric, neutral approach to international business.

Understand culture as an iceberg, where only the surface is visible at first, while deeper beliefs, attitudes, and communication styles emerge through living in the society and ongoing interaction.

Explore emic and etic approaches to understanding culture, learn to form neutral insights, and examine high-context and low-context cultures along with the role of corporate culture in global organizations.

Explore how cultural metaphors shape identities and how language underpins culture in international business. Learn translation risks, and how multinational companies apply Hofstede's theory to cross-cultural communication.

Explore foreign market entry strategies and the roles of focal firms, distribution channel intermediaries, and facilitators in international business, and distinguish intermediaries from facilitators.

Identify four categories in international business: focal firms, distribution channel intermediaries, facilitators, and governments, with roles from production to banking and trade regulation.

Identify focal firms as key players in international business, including multinational enterprises, born global firms, and small and medium enterprise, driving economic activity through production of goods and services.

Explore six foreign market entry strategies—exporting, licensing, franchising, turnkey contracting, joint ventures, and project-based non-equity partnerships—and their advantages, disadvantages, and how they transfer operations and risk.

Evaluate entry modes such as exporting, licensing, franchising, or non-equity partnerships by aligning goals, resources, and risk tolerance with target country conditions, competition, and product characteristics.

Assess four major entry factors—control, resource commitment, flexibility, and risk—to choose a mode of entry, from exporting or wholly owned subsidiaries to licensing, franchising, or project-based non-equity partnerships.

Identify push and pull factors that trigger internationalization, illustrating production, sales staff, and order placement in restaurant examples. Recognize evolving stages: growth, maturity, decline, and balance risk with ongoing learning.

Discover how exporting can boost sales, market share, and profitability through economies of scale. Weigh disadvantages like reliance on partners, extra resources, and tariff and non-tariff barriers.

Explore how foreign distributors, agents, manufacturing representatives, trading and export management companies, and online intermediaries connect focal firms to global buyers, aided by banks, freight forwarders, and consultants.

Review entry strategies by using a chart that links modes of entry to country and company size. Practice with an assignment and quiz to distinguish distribution channel intermediaries and facilitators.

Explore what emerging markets are, how they behave, and their advantages and risks. Compare emerging, advanced, and developing economies, and assess why companies focus on emerging markets and their potential.

The lecture compares advanced economies, developing economies, and emerging markets, using examples like Australia, the UK, the US, and BRICS nations, and explains how reforms and industrialization drive growth.

Explore how trade conditions, industry development, competition, ease of doing business, trade barriers, trade volumes, and inward FDI distinguish advanced, developing, and emerging markets.

Explore six drivers that make emerging markets attractive: lucrative target markets, low-cost manufacturing, sourcing and outsourcing opportunities, rising middle class, and purchasing power parity insights, including the Big Mac index.

Explore the six risks in emerging markets, from political instability to weak infrastructure, and learn mitigation strategies to target the growing middle class despite dominant family conglomerates.

Explore regional economic integration, its levels, advantages and dilemmas, and the World Trade Organization's objectives, to understand how country relationships create opportunities for organizations.

Explore the five levels of regional integration from free trade area to political union and learn how free movement of goods, labor, and capital, plus unified monetary policy, shapes regions.

Explore regional blocs like NAFTA, the EU, and ASEAN; learn how integration expands markets, achieves economies of scale, and hinges on language similarity, proximity, political alignment, and cross-national economic dynamism.

Be aware of the dilemmas of regional integration, including trade diversion, loss of national identity, autonomy sacrifice, transfer of power to advantaged firms, and corporate restructuring and job losses.

Explore the World Trade Organization (WTO), a forum for governments to negotiate trade rules and resolve disputes, aiming to raise living standards and ease doing business.

Explore key terms in international business, including GSP, FTA, antidumping and countervailing duties, sanctions, embargoes, subsidies, and tariffs. Understand why these concepts matter for navigating the global arena.

The generalized system of preference (GSP) provides preferential treatment to developing economies by eliminating tariffs on selected agricultural products—poultry, meat, fish, cheese, spices, nuts, and fruits—boosting their economic prosperity.

Identify how free trade agreements between countries reduce tariffs on select products, enabling easier market access and trade without duties for eligible goods.

Analyze anti-dumping and countervailing duties, how export prices undercut local markets trigger AD or CVD, and how investigations enforce duties with examples like steel and solar panels.

Sanctions and embargoes impose trade penalties to push governments to comply with UN resolutions, with embargoes delivering complete import-export bans and travel limits, as Cuba shows; companies may face boycotts.

Explore how government subsidies, including cash payments, tax cuts, easier loans, and procurement policies, lower costs for companies and enhance export competitiveness.

Tariffs tax imports and raise the landed cost, illustrated by a 20 percent duty on iPhones that makes a $1,000 product cost $1,200 to discourage imports.

Explore how currency exchange rates affect international business profitability amid fluctuation. Identify how currency risk, exposure, asset valuation, foreign taxation, transfer pricing, and inflation shape decisions.

Explore convertible and non-convertible currencies, distinguishing hard reserve currencies like the dollar, euro, and yen from non-convertible ones, and understand implications for Kenyan shilling exchangeability in international transactions.

Demand and supply in foreign exchange markets determine currency rates, and economic growth, interest rate and inflation, market psychology, and government action drive their movements.

Assess how the nature of the product, production location, distribution complexity, and local purchasing power shape international pricing and market-based strategies.

Understand rigid cost-plus pricing, keeping export prices constant with margins for free trade and exchange risk. Compare flexible cost-plus and incremental pricing, adjusting for fixed and variable costs.

Transfer pricing describes the pricing of intermediate or finished goods exchanged among subsidiaries within a corporate family to shift profits, sometimes below cost to repatriate earnings and evade taxes.

Discuss where transfer pricing occurs across economies with different corporate income tax rates, repatriation rules, and branch structures.

Explain how gray marketing exploits price differences by importing genuine products via unauthorized intermediaries and selling at higher prices; apply coping strategies like standardizing prices and promoting authorized distributors.

Explore five major international payment terms: cash in advance, open account, letter of credit, documentary collection, and consignment payment, plus risk considerations and bank roles.

Explore how counter trade combines barter, compensation deals, and buyback agreements in international transactions. See how multiple payment terms and ERP integration complicate deal execution.