Going abroad is not one decision

For the Portuguese new ventures in the internationalization study, the question is not whether “internationalization” helps or hurts survival. The useful question is which internationalization choice changes: the share of revenue tied to foreign markets, the age at which exporting begins, the speed of expansion after entry, or the range of regions served. This chapter separates those dimensions and compares their different demands so that a venture can judge exposure, learning, and coordination rather than treating foreign activity as one risk score.

That distinction matters for a young firm because international growth can produce both resources and strain. Foreign customers may diversify revenue, reveal new opportunities, and create learning that improves future performance. At the same time, a new venture must adapt routines, communicate across markets, manage unfamiliar transactions, and fund operations before it has accumulated much experience or slack. A strategy can therefore contain a survival benefit in one dimension and a hazard in another.

Four ways a new venture can go abroad

The first dimension is international intensity: the percentage of sales that comes from foreign markets. It measures dependence, not merely presence. A venture with one export customer and a venture whose revenue is mostly foreign may both count as international, but they carry very different exposures. Intensity asks how much of the venture’s economic life depends on markets beyond its home base.

High intensity can reduce dependence on a single domestic market and enlarge the customer base. It can also make a young venture more vulnerable. Foreign sales require logistics, communication, market adaptation, transaction management, and the ability to respond when economic conditions change abroad. As the foreign share grows, the venture must coordinate a larger portfolio of customers and routines while still meeting domestic obligations. If the firm lacks financial and managerial resources, the cost of that coordination can exceed the benefit of revenue diversification.

The second dimension is age at entry: the venture’s age in years when it makes its first export. A larger value means later entry. This measure is easy to confuse with intensity, but it answers a different question. Age at entry concerns when the venture first crosses the border; intensity concerns how dependent it later becomes on foreign sales. A firm can enter early and remain lightly exposed, or enter later and quickly make foreign markets central to its revenue.

Timing creates a real trade-off. International entrepreneurship theory emphasizes the possible learning advantages of newness. A young venture may develop domestic and international routines together, without having to undo a deeply established home-market model. Early exposure may also force the firm to learn quickly. But newness does not remove the liabilities of having little reputation, social capital, tangible resources, or foreign-market experience. Early entrants may be trying to learn, coordinate, and finance growth before they have a stable base from which to do so.

Later entry offers time to accumulate resources, legitimacy, and knowledge before taking on foreign-market demands. It can reduce the immediate burden of learning abroad while the venture is still fragile. It is not costless. A venture that has built its domestic operation around one set of routines may need to reconfigure them when it begins exporting. Waiting can therefore exchange early resource strain for later adaptation costs. The empirical question is which cost dominates in the ventures being observed.

The third dimension is post-entry speed: how quickly foreign sales increase after the first international move.