Proceedings of 8th Annual London Business Research Conference
Imperial College, London, UK, 8 - 9 July, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-922069-28-3
Strategic Motives of International Strategic Alliances:
Perspectives of Saudi Firms
Mushal Almasaad
We examine the strategic motivation for international strategic alliance
(ISA) formation and partner selection criteria in a sample of 134 Saudi
ISAs using questionnaire data obtained from Saudi partners. The highest
ranked strategic motives of the Saudi firms are enable diversification of
products or services, establish presence in the market, and faster entry to
the market. On the other hand, the major strategic motives for alliance
formation of the foreign firms are characterised as suspected by market
entry and establishing business successfully in Saudi Arabia. The relative
importance of strategic motives for ISA formation is found to vary a little
between Saudi firms and foreign firms. We also examine aspects of
partner selection criteria for ISA formation from the perspective of Saudi
partners. Findings show that the task-related selection criteria are
determined slightly more by the strategic motives for ISA formation than
are the partner-related selection criteria. This confirms that task-related
selection criteria tend to be specific to the alliance whereas partnerrelated selection criteria are more general in nature. However, the slight
differences are an indication of the importance of nature of the partner
from the perspective of the Saudi firm.
Keyword: International Business Management, Strategy
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Mushal Almasaad, School of Management, University of London, United Kingdom.
Email: mushal.almasaad.2009@live.rhul.ac.uk