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Purpose – This paper aims to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the patterns of internationalisation of multinational corporations and provide a measure of their degree of globalisation at the firm-level. There is much debate in the literature on the regional nature of the globalisation of multinational corporations (Rugman and Oh, 2013). Design/methodology/approach – The authors use firm-level sales data to analyse the location of sales and patterns of globalisation of 1,276 companies across ten countries and ten industries from 1998-2012. Findings – The results show that while international sales are rising and the proportion of home region-oriented firms is falling, the majority of sales of the companies in our data set continues to be in the Triad, with little growth in non-Triad regions. The authors find one common theme for the majority of countries, an increase in sales to Asia yet concentrated in just four industries, financials, basic materials, oil and gas and technology. Despite an increase in the percentage of host-region, bi-regional and global companies, 62.6 per cent of the firms have not changed multinational classification over the 15-year period, 43.1 per cent have not expanded out of their home region and 16.4 per cent have not expanded out of their home market. The authors find some evidence of liabilities of interregional foreignness at the industry and country level. The authors show regional sales are moving towards matching global economic activity for the 50 most globalised firms in our study but less so for the other firms in our sample. Overall, the results show that the majority of the growth in internationalisation comes from a small minority of firms. Originality/value – The authors make several advances across the literature on internationalisation, including a more in-depth longitudinal analysis of firm-level multinationality than exists to date and a novel method of measuring firm-level globalisation.

We conduct the most comprehensive empirical analysis that exists to date of the effect multinationality has on the explanatory power of country and industry factors in international diversification. We investigate the impact the size, scope, and location of a company's international sales has on country versus industry factors, analysing 1,Spain, the UK, and the US over the 15-year period, 1998-2012. We find that the magnitude of the country factor is greater than the magnitude of the industry factor for the period as a whole but that a company's level of international sales has a greater impact on the magnitude of its industry factor than the magnitude of its country factor.Counter-intuitively, we find stocks with lower sales exposure to their country of origin have a higher country factor, and we show the existence of both a strong local and international industry factor. Our results suggest countryof-origin diversification may no longer be sufficient to exploit country-specific risk and the country factor has become a "country classification" factor.

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