Challenges of Internationalisation for the SMEs of Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is one of the developing nations with a GDP growth rate is close to the emerging economy level like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa together commonly known as BRICS. Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone for the development of this economy. As majority of the organisations in this country are considered as SME, the increasing number of internationalisation of SMEs mean the access to the more foreign currencies, increased job and business opportunities, and overall improvement of the size of the GDP. Thus, the purpose of this study is identifying the major challenges of internationalisation for the SMEs of Bangladesh so that the challenges canbe mitigate strategically. To meet the purpose of the research the target research population is divided into three categories as current exporters, previous exporters and potential exporters to test the significance of different perceived challenge among three different groups. A questionnaire based mail survey method was used to access data from 103 current exporters using random sampling with 25.75% response rate. Another 100 non-exporters consist of previous and potential exporters were also selected using judgmental sampling techniques. After gathering and analysing all the data from the three groups a list of 39 factors have identified which could be considered as challenges of internationalisation for the SMEs of Bangladesh, although the intensity of these challenges is different among the three targeted groups. The study is conducted among the SMEs in three different regions of Bangladesh namely Dhaka, Chittagong and Khulna division. Therefore, caution should be taken in generalisation of the research. Besides, this research is significantly different from other studies, as the research is intendent to cover most industries other than the textile, ready-made garments (RMG) and pharmaceutical industries of Bangladesh. The researchers intentionally omitted these three industries as hundreds of researches are previously conducted based on these three industries and most of the organizations in these three sectors are considered as big enterprise.