The impact of internationalisation and proprietary assets on firm performance: An empirical analysis of Taiwanese high-tech firms

This paper examines the impact of internationalisation and proprietary assets on the performance of 170 Taiwanese TSE-listed high-tech firms notable for their OEM and ODM businesses. Our results clearly show an inverted U-shaped relationship between internationalisation and performance. Although increased levels of internationalisation brought significant benefits to performance during the period studied, the benefits generally began to decline when this level reached 44.9%. R&D assets were found to be positively associated with performance, whereas marketing assets were found to have a negative relationship with performance. We argue that the advertising intensity of these firms was too low to reach the threshold necessary to achieve economies of scale. Based upon our findings, future research directions and suggestions for firms are also discussed in the paper.