Disadvantages Three main drawbacks are associated with a turnkey strategy.
First, the firm that enters into a turnkey deal will have no long-term interest in the
foreign country. This can be a disadvantage if that country subsequently proves to be
a major market for the output of the process that has been exported. One way around
this is to take a minority equity interest in the operation. Second, the firm that enters
into a turnkey project with a foreign enterprise may inadvertently create a competitor.
For example, many of the Western firms that sold oil-refining technology to firms in
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf states now find themselves competing with these
firms in the world oil market. Third, if the firm’s process technology is a source of
competitive advantage, then selling this technology through a turnkey project is also
selling competitive advantage to potential or actual competitors.
Turnkey Project
A project in which a firm
agrees to set up an
operating plant for a
foreign client and hand
over the “key” when the
plant is fully operational.
hiL10544_ch12_396-421.indd 406 12/29/06 4:19:14 PM 12/29/06 4:19:14 PM
Chapter Twelve Entering Foreign Markets 407
LICENSING A licensing agreement is an arrangement whereby a licensor grants
the rights to intangible property to another entity (the licensee) for a specified period,
and in return, the licensor receives a royalty fee from the licensee. 12 Intangible property
includes patents, inventions, formulas, processes, designs, copyrights, and trademarks.
For example, to enter the Japanese market, Xerox, inventor of the photocopier,
established a joint venture with Fuji Photo that is known as Fuji–Xerox. Xerox then
licensed its xerographic know-how to Fuji–Xerox. In return, Fuji–Xerox paid Xerox a
royalty fee equal to 5 percent of the net sales revenue that Fuji–Xerox earned from the
sales of photocopiers based on Xerox’s patented know-how. In the Fuji–Xerox case,
the license was originally granted for 10 years, and it has been renegotiated and
extended several times since. The licensing agreement between Xerox and Fuji–Xerox
also limited Fuji–Xerox’s direct sales to the Asian Pacific region (although Fuji–Xerox
does supply Xerox with photocopiers that are sold in North America under the
Xerox label). 13
Advantages In the typical international licensing deal, the licensee puts up most
of the capital necessary to get the overseas operation going. Thus, a primary advantage
of licensing is that the firm does not have to bear the development costs and risks
associated with opening a foreign market. Licensing is attractive for firms lacking the
capital to develop operations overseas. In addition, licensing can be attractive when a
firm is unwilling to commit substantial financial resources to an unfamiliar or politically
volatile foreign market. A firm may use licensing when it wishes to participate in
a foreign market but is prohibited from doing so by barriers to investment. This was
one of the original reasons for the formation of the Fuji–Xerox joint venture in 1962.
Xerox wanted to participate in the Japanese market but was prohibited from setting up
a wholly owned subsidiary by the Japanese government. So Xerox set up the joint
venture with Fuji and then licensed its know-how to the joint venture.
Finally, licensing is frequently used when a firm possesses some intangible property
that might have business applications, but it does not want to develop those applications
itself. For example, Bell Laboratories at AT&T originally invented the transistor
circuit in the 1950s, but AT&T decided it did not want to produce transistors, so it
licensed the technology to a number of other companies, such as Texas Instruments.
Similarly, Coca-Cola has licensed its famous trademark to clothing manufacturers,
which have incorporated the design into clothing.
Disadvantages Licensing has three serious drawbacks. First, it does not give a
firm the tight control over manufacturing, marketing, and strategy that is required for
realizing experience curve and location economies. Licensing typically involves each
licensee setting up its own production operations. This severely limits the firm’s ability
to realize experience curve and location economies by producing its product in a centralized
location. When these economies are important, licensing may not be the best
way to expand overseas.
Second, competing in a global market may require a firm to coordinate strategic
moves across countries by using profits earned in one country to support competitive
attacks in another. By its very nature, licensing limits a firm’s ability to do this. A
licensee is unlikely to allow a multinational firm to use its profits (beyond those due in
the form of royalty payments) to support a different licensee operating in another
country.
A third problem with licensing is one that we encountered in Chapter 7 when we
reviewed the economic theory of FDI. This is the risk associated with licensing technological
know-how to foreign companies. Technological know-how constitutes the
basis of many multinational firms’ competitive advantage. Most firms wish to maintain
Licensing
Agreement
Arrangement in which a
licensor grants the rights
to intangible property
to the licensee for a
specified period and
receives a royalty fee in
return.
Part Five Competing in the Global Marketplace
control over how their know-how is used, and a firm
can quickly lose control over its technology by licensing
it. Many firms have made the mistake of
thinking they could maintain control over their
know-how within the framework of a licensing agreement.
RCA Corporation, for example, once licensed
its color TV technology to Japanese firms including
Matsushita and Sony. The Japanese firms quickly assimilated
the technology, improved on it, and used it
to enter the U.S. market, taking substantial market
share away from RCA.
There are ways of reducing this risk. One way is
by entering into a cross-licensing agreement with
a foreign firm. Under a cross-licensing agreement, a
firm might license some valuable intangible property
to a foreign partner, but in addition to a royalty payment,
the firm might also request that the foreign
partner license some of its valuable know-how to the
firm. Such agreements may reduce the risks associated with licensing technological
know-how, because the licensee realizes that if it violates the licensing contract (by
using the knowledge obtained to compete directly with the licensor), the licensor can
do the same to it. Cross-licensing agreements enable firms to hold each other hostage,
which reduces the probability that they will behave opportunistically toward each
other. 14 Such cross-licensing agreements are increasingly common in high-technology
industries. For example, the U.S. biotechnology firm Amgen licensed one of its key
drugs, Nuprogene, to Kirin, the Japanese pharmaceutical company. The license gives
Kirin the right to sell Nuprogene in Japan. In return, Amgen receives a royalty payment
and, through a licensing agreement, gained the right to sell some of Kirin’s
products in the United States.
Another way of reducing the risk associated with licensing is to follow the
Fuji–Xerox model and link an agreement to license know-how with the formation of a
joint venture in which the licensor and licensee take important equity stakes. Such an
approach aligns the interests of licensor and licensee, because both have a stake in
ensuring that the venture is successful. Thus, the risk that Fuji Photo might appropriate
Xerox’s technological know-how, and then compete directly against Xerox in the
global photocopier market, was reduced by the establishment of a joint venture in
which both Xerox and Fuji Photo had an important stake.