General characteristics

In this section, an overall description of the sample is presented. A summary is given in table 13. First of all, the general characteristics of the sample are pre-sented. This includes a) the year when the companies were founded b) the starting year of export operations c) the year when the export product was developed and d) the country/market of foreign operations about which respondents answered the survey.

a) FONDYEAR - Year of foundation: As can be seen from Table 13 for the total sample N=100 firms, 32 cases were founded before 1995, 40 cases in the time period 1996 - 2000 and 27 cases between the years 2001- 2005.

b) EXPYEAR - Year of starting export operations: A small proportion of the total sample, only 7 cases, started export operations before 1995. While 26 cases started between the years 1996- 2000, 57 cases started export operations in the

time period 2001- 2005. A total of 10 cases started export operations later than 2005.

c) PRDTDEVYEAR - Year of export product development: From the total sam-ple N=100, a total of 7 firms developed their export product before 1990. Then, in the time period 1991-1995, there were 13 cases. 19 cases developed an export product between the years 1996-2000 with 61 cases during the years 2001- 2006.

Table 13. General characteristics of the sample firms

a) Year of Foundation Frequency Percent

Before 1975 1 1.1

1976-1980 2 2.2

1981-1985 6 6.5

1986-1990 12 13

1991-1995 11 11

1996-2000 40 40

2001-2005 27 27

b)The starting year of export operations

Before 1990 3 3.2

1991-1995 4 4.0

1996-2000 26 26.7

2001-2005 57 57.3

Later than 2005 10 10.8

c) Year of export product development

Before 1985 4 4.1

1985-1990 3 3.2

1991-1995 13 9.7

1996-2000 19 20.4

2001-2006 61 61.6

d) Country/market of operations

Scandinavia 33 33.9

United Kingdom 7 7.5

America (North and

South) 20 20.4

Europe 25 26.9

Asia Pacific 9 9.8

Asia 4 4.3

Global 2 2.2

Comparing the year of product export product development with the number of firms which started export operations between the years 2001-2006, it was clear that the major proportion of the sample cases (80 firms) started export operations in the same time period when the export product had been developed. Table 13 presents an overall summary of the general characteristics of the sample of the study. The percentage may not be exact 100 % due to rounding off.

d) INTLOPERCON - the country/market of foreign operations about which re-spondents answered the survey: From the total sample N=100, 33 cases (33.9 %) answered the survey from the viewpoint of export operations in Scandinavian countries, followed by 25 (26.9 %) for European operations. A total of 20 firms answered the survey for their export operations in America (North and South), and lastly 9 firms answered for Asia Pacific countries. Table 14 presents a sum-mary of the descriptive statistics for the general characteristics of the study sam-ple.

Table 14. Descriptive statistics for general characteristics of the sample

Minimum Maximum Mean Std.

Devia-tion Skewness Kurtosis Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Std.

Error Statistic Std.

Error FONDTYEAR 1974 2006 1995 7.156 -1.094 .247 .383 .490 EXPYEAR 1985 2007 2001 3.772 -1.544 .249 3.919 .493 PRDTDEVYEAR Before

1984

2001-2006

1996-2000 .90686 -1.672 .247 2.323 .490 INTLOPERTNCON 1 7 2.86 1.686 .369 .247 -.836 .490 It can be seen from the skewness values in Table 14 that most of the variables lie at the maximum end of the distribution. This can be matched with Table 13 where 78 of the total number of firms were founded between years 1995-2006. Simi-larly, a greater proportion of firms out of the total sample started export opera-tions in the period 1995-2005. A total of 10 firms started export operaopera-tions after 2005. Thus, the export product development years fall between the higher ends of the distribution i.e. 1995-2006. For the names of the international countries of export operations, values from 1-7 were assigned as: 1=Scandinavia, 2= the UK, 3= the USA + Canada, Latin America, 4= Europe (including Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Eastern Europe), 5= Asia (in-cluding China, Russia, South Korea and India), 6= Asia Pacific (in(in-cluding Japan, Hong Kong Australia and New Zealand), 7= Global, as some of the respondents

answered with just ‘global’, without naming any country. Positive kurtosis values also indicate that the distribution is clustered in the centre. Positive skewness for this variable also shows that most of the respondents answered the survey from the viewpoint of companies lying at the low ends of the distribution, meaning from 1 towards 2 and 3 and onwards.

In this study, the size of the firm was measured by the number of personnel work-ing on the export product. It must be noted here that the respondents were specifi-cally asked to state the number of employees only working on the export product and not the total number of employees in the company. As can be seen in Table 15, 71 firms had between 1-50 employees working on the export product. Be-cause of the small size of the firms, it can be said that all the employees were working on the same product. The other aim to gauge the firm size by the number of personnel working on the export product was to measure the level of foreign commitment from these firms. The overall size of the firm in terms of the total number of employees was not requested, because export expansion was investi-gated from the viewpoint of one specific product of the company. The overall size of the firm in terms of the total number of employees may be used as an indicator of size and performance, but perhaps not as an indicator of export expansion and size with reference to a specific product in one specific foreign market.

From the total sample, about 71 % of the companies had a range of 1-50 employ-ees working on the export product. A total of twelve cases had more than 100 employees and only two cases had more than 250 employees working on the ex-port product. The frequency distribution of employees working on the exex-port pro-duct is given in Table 15.

Table 15. Distribution of the number of employees working on the export product

Number of employees 1-50 51-100

101-150

151-200

201-250 More than

250

Total

Frequency 71 15 6 2 4 2 100

Percent 77.2 8.7 4.3 2.2 4.3 2.2 100%