Characteristics of export operations

The characteristics of export operations were related to the general information about this activity in the sample firms. It included a) the duration of export opera-tions, b) the number of export countries served in this time duration, c) the total

number of export products of the companies d) the total number of foreign cus-tomers e) the number of foreign distributors and f) the number of foreign technol-ogy partners. The frequency distribution for each of these is given in Table 16.

The percentage may not be exact 100 % due to rounding off.

Table 16. Distribution of the characteristics of export operations

Characteristics Frequency Cumulative

a) DURATION – The duration of export operations: The duration of export op-erations described the overall export time period of the company. A total of 53

cases had exported from 1-5 years, 38 cases from 6-10 years and 6 cases had ex-ported to foreign countries from 11-15 years. Only 3 cases had more than 15 years of export experience.

b) NUMEXPCON - Number of export countries: This described the total number of export countries to which firms were selling their export product. From the total sample, 69 cases were exporting the product to between 1-5 countries, 14 cases to between 6-10 countries, 13 to between 11-20 countries and the rest ex-ported the product to more than 41 countries.

c) NUMEXPRDT - Number of export products: From the total sample, 84 cases had in the range of 1-10 export products. The rest of the cases had more than 10.

d) NUMINTLCLNT- Number of foreign customers: A total of 30 cases dealt with 1-10 foreign customers in all their countries of exports, 26 cases had 11-20, 16 cases had 41-200 and 11 cases had between 201-1000 foreign customers.

e & f) NUMINTLDIS & NUMINTLFT - Number of foreign distributors and technology partners: A total of 61 cases dealt with between 1-10 foreign distribu-tors in the export countries. The number for 14 cases ranged between 11-20 dis-tributors. A total of 7 cases had greater than 20. In total, 18 cases had no foreign distributors at all, but dealt with foreign technology partners in the relevant export markets. A total of 73 cases had partnerships with between 1-5 foreign technol-ogy partners and 14 cases had more than 5.

Table 17 presents a summary of the description of the export characteristics of the overall sample.

Table 17. Descriptive statistics for the export characteristics of the sample

Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Dev Skewness Kurtosis

Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Std.

Error Statistic Std.

Error DURATION 1 36 6.50 5.075 2.825 .249 12.622 .493 NUMEXPCON 1 100 11.63 14.497 3.416 .247 15.536 .490 NUMEXPRDT 0 50 5.07 6.585 4.399 .247 25.180 .490 NUMINTLCLNT 0 100000 1537 10521 9.066 .249 84.970 .493 NUMINTLDIS 0 100 8.08 16.291 4.269 .247 20.845 .490 NUMINTLFT 0 15 2.43 2.835 2.644 .247 8.139 .490

Positive skewness and kurtosis values in Table 17 indicate scores clustered to the left of low values and clustered in the centre respectively. It can also be seen from Table 16 that for the duration of export operations almost 88 percent of the total number of firms had export operations going on for 1-10 years. The mean of export operation years for the total sample was 6.5. Similarly, for the number of export countries, about 72 percent of firms had export operations in 1-5 countries with a mean of 11.63. All the other values also lie at the lower end of the distribu-tion.

The export characteristics were also analyzed by seeing how firms changed the sales method from first to current. The first sales method referred to the one used upon market entry, whereas the current sales method referred to a change after operating for sometime in the foreign country. As mentioned in the analysis of the software industry, software development firms use a combination of sales meth-ods by using different export sales channel strategies. Further, depending on the successive resource commitment of the firms in foreign markets and the embry-onic nature of software products, the sales method also undergoes an evolution from direct to indirect or a combination of both.

The first and current sales method of the sample firms is shown in Table 18.

Table 18. Distribution of the first and current sales methods of sample firms

From the total sample, 49 cases started sales operations as direct exports at the time of entry into the target country, 17 started export operations via a distributor

or value-added reseller, 4 as a joint venture, 8 as licensing and 22 sold the product through online delivery.

First sales method: From the total sample, 49 cases started sales operations as direct exports at the time of entry into the target country. Of these, 27 cases still used direct exports as the current sales method. 16 out of the 49 cases changed to distributors, 3 changed to a wholly owned sales subsidiary and 3 changed to on-line sales. This can be seen in the second column of Table 18.

Current sales method: Out of a total of 49 firms who began with the direct sales method, 27 kept to this method, as stated above. However, 2 cases were added when they changed the sales method from the distributor to the direct method, and one case was added when it changed from online as the first sales method to the direct method. Thus, altogether there were 30 cases trading through the direct sales method at the time.

Regarding the number of 48 cases operating with the then current sales method of distributors, 15 of them continued to follow the distributor sales method. A total of 16 more cases were added when firms who had started with direct exports changed to the distributor sales method. Similarly, a total of 17 more cases were added when firms changed the first sales method from online product delivery to the distributor sales method. This can be seen in the third column of Table 18.

Regarding the wholly owned sales method, 3 cases adopted it as a first sales method and continued to follow it. One more case was added from the licensing sales mode, while 3 more were added when firms changed from the direct sales to the wholly owned sales method. This can be seen in column 5 of Table 18. From the total sample, 8 cases started as licensing modes. Out of these 8, 7 followed the same method and one changed to the wholly owned sales subsidiary. This can be seen in column 6 of Table 18. Regarding the online sales delivery method, a total of 22 cases adopted it as their first sales method. Out of these, 17 changed to the distributor sales method, as mentioned above. 5 of the 22 cases followed the then current online sales method