This book examines Foreign Direct Investment of major Korean automotive companies in Europe, with particular reference to how economic integration has affected the motivations and patterns of FDI and industrial location. The book is a valuable source of information on FDI, the automobile industry in Europe and South Korea and business decision-making process in general.

In 1962, South Korea assembled just 1,100 new automobiles. By 1996, this total had soared to 2,812,714. What explains this remarkable growth? The answer is complex, and involves a combination of a supportive State, timely technology alliances, a skilled but historically low-paid workforce, aggressive pricing, savvy entrepreneurs, and fortuitous circumstances. Despite this amazing ascent, comparatively little has been written about the Korean auto industry in English. In the first of a two-volume set, this 11-chapter book seeks to help fill this void by providing in-depth examinations of all six of Korea’s automakers from their beginnings through 1996. Uniquely written from the perspective of industry analysts at the time (without knowledge of the Asian Fiscal Crisis), the book should prove informative to practitioners, scholars, and students interested in automotive history, international political economy, Asian studies, and more.

This volume chronicles the maturation of the South Korean auto industry and its native automakers, from the 1997 Asian Crisis to 2019. After examining the context for domestic vehicle production in South Korea, the author presents multiple case studies for all five Korean automakers: General Motors Korea/Daewoo Motors, Kia, Hyundai, Ssangyong and Renault Samsung. This includes coverage of Hyundai-Kia’s foreign plants in North America, Europe, India, China, and Emerging Asia. The book closes by assessing the five-to-ten-year future outlooks for Korean automakers at home and abroad. This important work will prove informative to scholars of business, management, automotive history, international development, Asian studies, and public administration.

Japanese foreign direct investment has played a leading role in Asian economies for more than two decades. This book, describing the changing industrial dynamics after the Asian currency crisis in 1997, focuses on corporate strategies of Japanese automobile and electronics companies in Asian nations, with detailed analysis of management issues and strategies from the viewpoint of both the home economy and the recipient host economies. Among the cases presented are the global restructuring of the Korean automobile industry and the transfer of automotive technology to China via Taiwan. Other studies, from the electronics industry, look at production sites in Malaysia, backward integration in Singapore, and forward integration in Hong Kong. The contributions of specialists from Asia, Europe, and the United States collected here envision an ongoing process of globalization and provide valuable perspective and background for business management and East Asian studies.

This book examines the dramatic increase in automotive assembly plants in the former Socialist Central European (CE) nations of Czechia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia from 1989 onwards. Enticed by relatively lower-wage labour and significant government incentives, the world’s largest automakers have launched more than 20 passenger car assembly complexes in CE nations, with production accelerating dramatically since 2001. As a result, the annual passenger car production in Western Europe declined by more than 20% between 2001 and 2015, and alternatively in the CEE it increased by nearly 170% during this period. Drawing on case studies of 25 current and former foreign-run assembly plants, the author presents a rare historical account of automotive foreign assembly plants in the CE following this dramatic geographic shift. This book will expand the knowledge of policy-makers in Europe in relation to their pursuits of FDI and will be of great interest to scholars and students of business, economic history, political science, and development.

In the decade following the Asian financial crisis, the East Asian political economy has experienced a radical transformation. This book thus investigates the responses of Japanese automotive makers to the processes of regionalism and regionalization by locating firm-level analysis in a broader political economy context.

The rise of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from emerging markets is topical, important and poses a number of questions and challenges that require considerable attention in the future from academia as well as business management. The recent takeovers of high-profile companies in developed or developing countries by non-European emerging-market MNEs (EMNEs) – such as Lenovo, Wanhua (China), Hindalco (India), CVRD (Brazil), Cemex (Mexico), Lukoil (Russia), etc. – as well as the greenfield or brownfield investments of emerging companies (such as Huawei, ZTE, Tata, Pepco, etc.) show a new trend where new kind of firms become major players globally. EMNEs have become important players in several regions around the globe, ranging from the least developed countries of Africa through the developing markets in Latin America and Asia to the developed countries of the United States or the European Union, including East Central European (ECE) countries. EMNEs presence on the global level has resulted in numerous studies in the international literature but those research results barely cover EMNEs’ activities in the ECE region (in the East Central European EU member countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). The existing books typically focus on the investment activity of a single country or region (such as China or East Asia) but a comprehensive analysis is still missing in this regard. The novelty of this edited volume is that it aims at exploring EMNEs location determinants, strategies, activities and challenges in East Central Europe by discussing its anomalies to the traditional theories as well as to other types of MNEs in the ECE region. The authors focus on EMNEs not only from China but from other important emerging countries, too, such as Russia, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Brazil or South Africa.